CHAPTER XIII

MANES AND THE MANICHAEANS

Contrast between Mithraism and Manichaeism—Life and Death of

Manes—Ardeshîr, son of Sassan, finds religion necessary to

State—Restores Zoroastrianism—Manichaeism a Zoroastrian heresy—Christian

account of origin of Manichaeism too late—Manes’ cardinal doctrines

Persian—Conflict between Light and Darkness—Satan and the First

Man—Defeat of latter and creation of Universe—The Redemption of the

Light—Birth and ancestry of Adam—Jesus sent as Saviour to

Adam—Infidelity of Eve and its results—Likeness of these to Mandaite

stories—Rôles of Buddha, Zoroaster, and Jesus in Manichaeism—The

salvation and transmigration of souls—The death of the perfect

righteous—Of the Hearer—Distinction between Perfect and Hearer peculiar

to Manichaeism—Obligations of Hearers—Hatred of Manes for Jews—Manes

aims at syncretic religion—MSS. found at Turfan prove chameleon-like

character of Manichaeism—Manichaeans are Christians among Christians,

Buddhists among Buddhists—Manichaean Cosmogony and Anthropogony in Bar

Khôni and the Turkestan MSS.—-Organization of Manichaean Church—Ritual

of Manichaeans confined to prayers and hymns—Manichaean prayers from

Mahommedan sources—_Khuastuanift_ or Manichaean Litany from Turkestan

given with commentary—Perfect redeem Light by eating food—Hearers’

fasts help scheme of redemption—Sacrament among Manichaeans

doubtful—Symbolical pictures in Manichaean Churches—Festivals of the

Bema, Christmas, and Sunday—Manichaean Scriptures—Manichaean treatise

found at Tunhuang—The two great archangels and the division of the

sexes—History of Manichaeism 277-357

CONCLUSION

End of Paganism—Supremacy of Christianity in West—Its borrowings from

its defeated rivals—Triumph of Christianity survival of fittest 358-361

Index 362-425

CHAPTER VII

POST-CHRISTIAN GNOSTICS

It will be seen, from what has been said in the first volume, that, even

at the beginning of the Christian era, there was no lack of αἵρεσις or

choice of creeds offered to those peoples of the Levant who had outgrown

their national religions; and it may be a surprise to many that more

notice was not taken by the Christians of the Apostolic age of these

early essays at a universal faith. Some writers, indeed, among whom

Bishop Lightfoot is perhaps the most notable, have thought that they

could detect allusions to them in the Canonical writings, and that by

the “worshipping of angels, intruding into those things which man hath

not seen, vainly puffed up by the understanding of his flesh[1]” which

St Paul condemns in the Epistle to the Colossians, must be understood

the teachings of Gnostic sects already in existence[2]. Others have gone

further, and think that the Fourth Gospel was itself written under

Gnostic influence[3], and that the Apocalypse attributed to the same

author vituperates under the name of the Nicolaitans a Christian sect

professing Gnostic tenets[4]. Even if this be so, however, the

comparatively late date assigned to all these documents[5] must prevent

their being received as evidence of what happened in the earliest stage

of the Christian Church; and we find no proof that Gnosticism ever

seriously competed for popular favour with orthodox Christianity until

well into the IInd century[6]. That the first Christians would take

little heed either of organized religions like that of the Alexandrian

divinities, or of the speculations of the Orphic poets and of such sects

as the Simonians is plain, when we consider the way in which their

expectation of the Parusia or Second Coming dominated every moment of

their lives[7]. They believed with the unquestioning faith of children

that their dead Master would presently return to the earth, and that it

would then be destroyed to make way for a new state of things in which,

while the majority of mankind would be condemned to everlasting fire,

His followers should taste all the joys of Paradise. With this before

their eyes, they turned, as has been said, their possessions into a

common fund[8], they bound themselves together in a strict association

for mutual help and comfort, and they set to work to sweep their fellows

into the Christian fold with an earnestness and an energy that was the

fiercer because the time for its exercise was thought to be so short.

“The Lord is at hand and His reward,” a saying which seems to have been

a password among them[9], was an idea never absent from their minds, and

the result was an outburst of proselytism such as the world till then

had never seen.

“They saw,” says a writer who was under no temptation to exaggerate

the charity and zeal of the primitive Church, “their fathers and

mothers, their sisters and their dearest friends, hurrying onward to

that fearful pit, laughing and singing, lured on by the fiends whom

they called the gods. They felt as we should feel were we to see a

blind man walking towards a river bank.... Who that could hope to

save a soul by tears and supplications would remain quiescent as men

do now?.... In that age every Christian was a missionary. The

soldier sought to win recruits for the heavenly host; the prisoner

of war discoursed to his Persian jailer; the slave girl whispered

the gospel in the ears of her mistress as she built up the mass of

towered hair; there stood men in cloak and beard at street corners

who, when the people, according to the manners of the day, invited

them to speak, preached, not the doctrines of the Painted Porch, but

the words of a new and strange philosophy; the young wife threw her

arms round her husband’s neck and made him agree to be baptised,

that their souls might not be parted after death[10]....”

How could people thus preoccupied be expected to concern themselves with

theories of the origin of a world about to perish, or with the

philosophic belief that all the gods of the nations were but varying

forms of one supreme and kindly power?

Before the end of the Ist century, however, this belief in the immediate

nearness of the Second Coming had died away[11]. The promise that the

second Gospel puts into the mouth of Jesus that some of His hearers

should not taste of death until they saw the Son of Man come with

power[12], had become incapable of fulfilment by the death of the last

of those who had listened to Him. Nor were all the converts to the faith

which His immediate disciples had left behind them possessed with the

same simple faith and mental equipment as themselves[13]. To the poor

fishermen and peasants of Judaea had succeeded the slaves and freedmen

of great houses—including even Caesar’s own,—some of them professionally

versed in the philosophy of the time, and all with a greater or less

acquaintance with the religious beliefs of the non-Jewish citizens of

the great Roman Empire[14]. The preachings and journeys of St Paul and

other missionaries had also brought into the Christian Church many

believers of other than Jewish blood, together with the foreign

merchants and members of the Jewish communities scattered throughout the

Roman world, who were better able than the Jews of Palestine to

appreciate the stability and the organized strength of the Roman Empire

and to desire an alliance with it. To ask such men, deeply engaged as

many of them were in the pursuit of wealth, to join in the temporary

communism and other-worldliness practised by the first Christian Church

would have been as futile as to expect the great Jewish banking-houses

of the present day to sell all that they have and give it to the poor.

Another cause that profoundly altered the views of the early Christian

communities must have been the catastrophe and final dispersion of the

Jewish nation. Up to the time of the destruction of the Temple of

Jerusalem under Titus, the Christians not only regarded themselves as

Jews[15], but were looked upon by such of the other subjects of Rome as

had happened to have heard of them, as merely one sect the more of a

race always factious and given to internal dissensions. Yet even in St

Paul’s time, the Christians were exposed to a bitter persecution at the

hands of those orthodox Jews who seemed to the Gentile world to be their

co-religionists[16], and it is probable that in the outbreak of

fanaticism attending the first Jewish war, they suffered severely at the

hands of both combatants[17]. The burning of the Temple must also have

been a crushing blow to all who looked for a literal and immediate

fulfilment of the Messianic hope, and its result was to further

accentuate the difference between the Christians and the Jews[18].

Moreover, the hatred and scorn felt by these last for all other members

of the human race had now been recognized by the Gentiles[19], and the

repeated insurrections attempted by the Jews between the time of Titus

and the final war of extermination under Hadrian showed that these

feelings were shared by the Jewish communities outside Palestine[20]. It

was therefore not at all the time which worldly-wise and prudent men, as

many of the later Christian converts were, would choose for identifying

themselves with a race which not only repudiated the relationship in the

most practical way, but had lately exposed themselves on other grounds

to the deserved execration of the civilized world.

It is, then, by no means surprising that some of the new converts should

have begun to look about them for some compromise between their recently

acquired convictions and the religious beliefs of the Graeco-Roman world

in which they had been brought up, and they found this ready to their

hand in the pre-Christian sects which we have ventured above to class

together under the generic name of Gnostic. In the Orphic poems, they

found the doctrine of successive ages of the world, each with its

different characteristics, which coincided well enough with the repeated

declaration of the Christians that the old world was passing away,—as

was indeed the fact since the conquests of Alexander[21]. They found,

too, both in the Orphic poems and in the mixed religions like that of

the Alexandrian divinities which had sprung from the doctrines taught by

these poems, the legend of a god dying and rising again for the

salvation of mankind told in a way which had many analogies with the

Gospel narratives of the Passion and Resurrection of Jesus[22]. Among

the Essenes, too, who may have owed, as has been said above, some of

their doctrines to Orphic inspiration, they found all the modest virtues

of sobriety, chastity, and mutual help which had already distinguished

the Christian Church above all the other religious associations of the

time. And among both the Orphics and the Essenes was to be noticed the

strained and fanciful system of interpretation by allegory and figure

which enabled them to put their own construction upon the words not only

of the books of the Jewish Canon, but of those writings which had begun

to circulate among the scattered Christian communities as containing the

authentic teaching of Jesus and His immediate disciples[23]. Add to this

that the Simonians, and no doubt other pre-Christian Gnostic sects of

which we have lost all trace, had already shown the mixed populations of

the Levant how to reconcile the innovations of a teacher of impressive

and commanding personality with their own ancestral traditions[24], and

that the many mysteries then diffused throughout the ancient world

offered a ready means of propagating new doctrines under cover of

secrecy; and it will be seen that most of the sources from which the

founders of the great post-Christian sects afterwards drew their systems

were then lying open and ready to hand.

The prize which awaited success was, moreover, no mean one. It is

sometimes said that the only distinction that awaited a leader of the

Church at this time was the distinction of being burned alive[25]. Yet

the fear of impeachment to be followed by a still more horrible death

never prevented English statesmen in the XVIIth century from struggling

with each other for place and power; while the State had not as yet made

any serious attempt to suppress the propagation of Christianity by

force. On the other hand, a Christian bishop, even at this early date,

occupied a position which was really superior to that of most

functionaries of the secular State. Gifted with almost complete power

over his flock in temporal as well as in spiritual matters, he was at

once their judge and their adviser; and, so long as there were Pagan

emperors on the throne, the faithful were forbidden to come to any

tribunal but his[26]. His judgments, too, had a greater sanction than

those of any temporal judge; for while he could not indeed lawfully

condemn any of his hearers to death, he had in the sentence of

excommunication which he alone could pronounce, the power of cutting

them off from eternal life. The adoration with which he was regarded by

them also surpassed the respect paid to proconsul or legate[27]; and the

literature of the time is full of allusions to the way in which, when

brought before the temporal rulers, he was attended by weeping

multitudes who crowded round him even in prison, imploring his blessing

and kissing his fetters[28]. Hence it is not to be wondered at that such

a position was eagerly sought after, that envy of the episcopate was the

principal sin against which the Christian writers of the sub-Apostolic

age warned their readers[29], and that it is to the disappointment at

failing to attain the highest places in the orthodox Church that they

ascribe the foundation of all the principal post-Christian sects[30].

Without taking this accusation as literally correct, it is plain that

the chance of irresponsible power over those whom they could convince

must have proved a most alluring bait to religious-minded persons who

were also ambitious and intellectual men of the world[31].

Thus it came about that during the IInd and IIIrd centuries, there arose

more than one teacher who set himself to construct a system which should

enable its votaries to retain the Hellenistic culture which Alexander’s

conquests had spread throughout the whole civilized world with the

religious and moral ideas which the enthusiasm and energy of the first

Christians had begun to diffuse among the lower classes of citizens[32].

Alexandria, the natural meeting-place between the East and West, was no

doubt the scene of the first of these attempts, and the writings of

Philo, fortunately still extant, had already shown the way in which the

allegorical system of interpretation could be used to this end. That

many of the founders of post-Christian Gnostic sects were Alexandrian

Jews is the constant tradition of the Christian Church, and is

antecedently probable enough[33]. But other Gnostic leaders were

certainly not Alexandrians and came from centres sufficiently distant

from Egypt to show that the phenomenon was very widely spread, and that

the same causes produced the same results in the most distant places and

entirely outside the Jewish community. Marcion, the founder of the

Marcionite Church, was a native of Pontus. Saturnilus or Saturninus—the

name is spelt differently by Irenaeus and Hippolytus—came from Antioch,

Theodotus from Byzantium, others, such as Cerdo, and probably Prepon the

Syrian, began teaching in Rome, while we hear of a certain Monoimus, who

is said to have been an Arab[34]. Most of these are to us merely names,

only very brief summaries of the different systems founded or professed

by them having been preserved in the heresiologies compiled by the

Fathers of the Church both before and immediately after the alliance of

the Christian Church with the Roman State under Constantine.

Of these treatises, the two, which, up to about sixty years ago, formed

our main sources of information with regard to the Gnostics of the

sub-Apostolic age[35], are the writings of St Irenaeus, Bishop of Lyons

about the year 177 A.D., and of Epiphanius, Bishop of Constantia in

Cyprus, who tells us he wrote in the seventh year of Gratian or 374 A.D.

The first of these is considerably later in date than the heresiarchs in

refutation of whose doctrines he wrote his five books “against

Heresies”; and although he is most probably honest in his account of

their tenets, it is evident that Irenaeus was incapable of

distinguishing between the opinions of the founders of the sects which

he controverts and those of their followers and successors. Epiphanius,

on the other hand, wrote when the Catholic Church was already

triumphant, and his principal object seems to have been to blacken the

memory of those competitors whom she had already outdistanced in the

race for popularity and power. Hence he spares no pains to rake together

every story which theological hatred and unclean imagination had ever

invented against her opponents and rivals; while his contempt for

consistency and the rules of evidence show the intellectual depths to

which the war which orthodox Christianity had from the first waged

against Hellenistic culture had reduced the learning of the age. The

language in which he and the other Catholic writers on heresy describe

the Gnostics is, indeed, the first and most salient instance of that

intolerance for any other opinions than their own, which a recent writer

of great authority declares the Apostles and their successors derived

from their Jewish nationality[36]. “The first-born of Satan,” “seducers

of women,” “savage beasts,” “scorpions,” “ravening wolves,” “demoniacs,”

“sorcerers,” and “atheists” were the mildest terms in which Epiphanius

and his fellow heresiologists can bring themselves to speak of the

sectaries. They afford ample justification for the remark of the

philosophic Emperor Julian that “no wild beasts are so hostile to men as

Christian sects in general are to one another[37].”

From this lack of trustworthy evidence, the discovery in 1842 at a

convent on Mt Athos of eight out of the ten books of the

_Philosophumena_ now generally attributed to Hippolytus, Bishop of

“Portus Romana” in 230 A.D.[38], seemed likely to deliver us. The work

thus recovered bore the title of the _Refutation of all Heresies_, and

did succeed in giving us a fairly clear and coherent account of some

twenty Gnostic sects, the very existence of many of which was previously

unknown to us. Moreover, it went a good way beyond its predecessors in

pointing out that the real origin of all the heretical sects then

existing was to be found, not so much in the diabolic inspiration which

other writers thought sufficient to account for it, as in the

Pythagorean, Platonic, and other philosophies then in vogue, together

with the practice of astrology and magic rites which had come to form an

important part of all the Pagan religions then popular. It also showed a

very extensive and apparently first-hand acquaintance with the works of

the Gnostic leaders, and the lengthy quotations which it gives from

their writings enable us to form a better idea than we had before been

able to do both of what the Gnostic tenets really were and of the

arguments by which they were propagated. Unfortunately the text of the

_Philosophumena_ has not been able to withstand the assaults of those

textual critics who have already reduced the Book of Genesis to a

patchwork of several authors writing at widely separate times and

places, and writers like Dr. Salmon and Prof. Stähelin have laboured to

show that the author of the _Philosophumena_ was taken in by a forger

who had himself concocted all the documents which Hippolytus quotes as

being the work of different heresiarchs[39]. Their conclusions, although

they do not seem to put the matter entirely beyond doubt, have been

accepted by many theological writers, especially in Germany, and in the

course of the discussion the fact has emerged that the documents quoted

can hardly go back to an earlier date than the year 200 A.D.[40] It is

therefore unlikely that Hippolytus had before him the actual words of

the heresiarchs whom he is endeavouring to refute; and if the

_Philosophumena_ were all we had to depend upon, we might despair of

knowing what “the great Gnostics of Hadrian’s time” really taught.

The reason for this paucity of documents is also plain enough. “The

antidote to the scorpion’s bite,” to use a patristic figure of

speech[41], was felt by the early Church to be the actual cautery, and

its leaders spared no pains to rout out and burn the writings of the

heretics pending the time when they could apply the same treatment to

their authors. Even before their alliance with Constantine had put the

resources of the State at their disposal, they had contrived to use the

secular arm for this purpose. In several persecutions, notably that of

Diocletian, which was probably the most severe of them all, the

Christian scriptures were particularly sought for by the Inquisitors of

the State, and many of the orthodox boasted that they had arranged that

the police should find the writings of the heretics in their stead[42].

Later, when it came to the turn of the Christians to dictate imperial

edicts, the possession of heretical writings was made punishable with

severe penalties[43]. Between orthodox Christian and Pagan it is a

wonder that any have survived to us.

A lucky chance, however, has prevented us from being entirely ignorant

of what the Gnostics had to say for themselves. In 1851, a MS. which had

been known to be in the British Museum since 1778, was published with a

translation into a curious mixture of Latin and Greek by the learned

Petermann, and turned out to include a sort of Gospel coming from some

early Gnostic sect[44]. From a note made on it by a writer who seems to

have been nearly contemporary with its scribes, it is known as _Pistis

Sophia_ or “_Faith-Wisdom_”; and the same MS. also contains fragments of

other works coming from a cognate source. In 1891, a papyrus in the

Bodleian Library at Oxford, which had been brought into this country in

1769 by the traveller Bruce, was also published with a French

translation by M. Amélineau, an ex-Abbé who has long made the later

Egyptian language his peculiar study, and proved to contain two

documents connected with the system disclosed in the _Pistis

Sophia_[45]. Both MSS. are in Coptic of the dialect of the Sahid or

Upper Egypt, to which fact they probably owe their escape from the

notice of the Byzantine Inquisitors; and they purport to contain

revelations as to the next world and the means of attaining salvation

therein made by Jesus on His return to earth after the Resurrection.

Although these several documents were evidently not all written at one

time and place, and cannot be assigned to a single author, the notes and

emendations appearing on the MSS. show that most of them must have been

in the possession of members of the same school as their composers; and

that therefore we have here for the first time direct and authentic

evidence of the Gnostic tenets, as put forward by their adherents

instead of by their opponents.

The collation of these documents with the excerpts from other Gnostic

writings appearing in early writers like Clement of Alexandria who were

not professed heresiologists[46], shows that the post-Christian Gnostic

sects had more opinions in common than would be gathered from the

statements of St Irenaeus, Hippolytus, and Epiphanius, and that they

probably fulfilled a real want of the age[47]. All of them seem to have

held that there was one Supreme Being, the source of all good, and that

matter was inherently malignant and opposed to him. All of them, too,

seem to have taught the perfectibility of man’s nature, the salvation of

at any rate the majority of mankind, and the possibility of their rising

in the scale of being; and all of them held that this was to be effected

mainly by means of certain mysteries or sacramental rites which were

assumed to have a magical efficacy. All these fundamental

characteristics find their origin in the beliefs of the pre-Christian

religions and religious associations described above, and doubtless owed

much to their influence. But with these, there was now combined for the

first time the recognition of the divinity of One who, while appearing

upon earth as a man among men, was yet thought by all to be endowed with

a greater share of the Divine nature than they. Orpheus, Moses, Homer,

and the Jewish prophets had in turn been claimed as religious teachers

who were divinely inspired; but Jesus was asserted by every later

Gnostic school of whose teachings we have any evidence to have been

Himself of higher essence and substance than the rest of mankind[48].

How far this assertion was dictated by the necessity for finding a

superhuman authority for the revelation which each Gnostic leader

professed to make to his disciples may be open to question; but in view

of some contemporary controversies it is well to draw attention to the

fact that the Divinity in some shape or other of Jesus, as well as what

is now called His “historicity,” was never for a moment called in

question during the first three centuries by Gnostic or Catholic.

Μονογενής or _Monogenes_[49]—a word which Catholic writers later

confused with Μονογεννητός or “only-begotten,” but which is best

represented by the corresponding Latin expression _unicus_ or “unique”

(_i.e._ one of a kind)—is the word in which the Gnostics summed up their

conceptions of the nature of Jesus[50].

This belief, however, led to consequences which do not at first sight

seem to follow from it. The gods of classical antiquity were indeed

supposed to be of like passions with ourselves, and the Greek of Homer’s

time never thought it shame to attribute to them jealousy or lust or

fear or vanity or any other of the weaknesses which afflict us[51]. But

the one feature besides their beauty that distinguished the Greek gods

from humanity was their immortality or freedom from death; and if

demigods like Heracles were said to have gone through the common

experience of mortals, this was held as proof that their apotheosis or

deification did not take place until they had left the earth[52]. So

much was this the case that the Greeks are said to have been much amused

when they first beheld the Egyptians wailing for the death of Osiris,

declaring that if he were a god he could not be dead, while if he were

not, his death was not to be lamented[53]; and Plutarch, when repeating

the story to his countrymen, thought it necessary to explain that in his

view the protagonists in the Osiris and Set legend were neither gods nor

men, but “great powers” or daemons not yet deified and in the meantime

occupying a place between the two[54]. The same difficulty was, perhaps,

less felt by the other Mediterranean peoples, among whom, as we have

seen, the idea of a god who died and rose again was familiar enough[55];

but the Gnostic leaders must always have had before their eyes the

necessity of making Christianity acceptable to persons in possession of

that Hellenistic culture which then dominated the world, and which still

forms the root of all modern civilization. How, then, were they to

account for the fact that their God Jesus, whether they considered Him

as the Logos or Word of Philo, or the Monogenes or Unique Power of the

Supreme Being, had suffered a shameful death by sentence of the Roman

procurator in Judaea?

The many different answers that they gave to this question showed more

eloquently than anything else the difficulties with which it was

surrounded. Simon, according to Hippolytus, said that Jesus only

appeared on earth as a man, but was not really one, and seemed to have

suffered in Judaea, although he had not really done so[56]. Basilides

the Egyptian, the leader of another sect, held, according to Irenaeus,

that the body of Jesus was a phantasm and had no real existence, Simon

of Cyrene having been crucified in his stead[57]; while Hippolytus, who

seems to have drawn his account of Basilides’ teaching from a different

source from that used by his predecessor, makes him say that only the

body of Jesus suffered and relapsed into “formlessness[58],” but that

His soul returned into the different worlds whence it was drawn.

Saturninus, another heresiarch, held, according to both authors, to the

phantasmal theory of Jesus’ body, which attained such popularity among

other Gnostic sects that “Docetism,” as the opinion was called, came to

be looked upon by later writers as one of the marks of heresy[59], and

Hippolytus imagines that there were in existence sects who attached such

importance to this point that they called themselves simply

Docetics[60]. Valentinus, from whose teaching, as we shall see, the

principal system of the _Pistis Sophia_ was probably derived, also

adhered to this Docetic theory, and said that the body of Jesus was not

made of human flesh, but was constructed “with unspeakable art” so as to

resemble it, the dove-like form which had descended into it at His

baptism leaving it before the Crucifixion[61]. According to Irenaeus,

too, Valentinus held that the Passion of Jesus was not intended as an

atonement or sacrifice for sin, as the Catholics taught, but merely as a

symbol or reflection of something that was taking place in the bosom of

the Godhead[62].

Another point in which the chief post-Christian Gnostic sects seem to

have resembled one another is the secrecy with which their teachings

were surrounded. Following strictly the practice of the various

mysteries—the Eleusinian, the Isiac, Cabiric, and others—in which the

Mediterranean god, whether called Dionysos, Osiris, Attis, Adonis, or by

any other name, was worshipped, none were admitted to a knowledge of

their doctrines without undergoing a long, arduous, and expensive course

of initiation. More than one Gnostic teacher is said to have told his

hearers to conceal from men what they were, or in other words not to let

it be known that they were affiliated to the sect[63], and all the

Fathers bear witness to the way in which in time of persecution the

Gnostics escaped by professing any faith that would satisfy the Roman

authorities. By doing so, they laid themselves open to the accusation

hurled at them with great virulence by the Church, that their secret

rites and doctrines were so filthy as to shock human nature if made

public—an accusation which at the first appearance of Christianity had

been brought against the Catholics, and which the Church has ever since

made use of against any sect which has differed from her, repeating it

even at the present day against the Jews and the Freemasons[64]. There

is, however, no reason why the accusation should be better founded in

one case than in the others; and it is plain in any event that the

practice of secrecy when expedient followed directly from the magical

ideas which have been shown above to be the foundation of the dogmas of

all the pre-Christian Gnostics, besides permeating religions like that

of the Alexandrian divinities. The willingness of the post-Christian

Gnostics to subscribe to any public profession of faith that might be

convenient was no doubt due to the same cause[65]. As has been well

said, to the true Gnostic, Paganism, Christianity, and Mahommedanism are

merely veils[66]. The secret words and formulas delivered, and the

secret rites which the initiate alone knows, are all that is necessary

to assure him a distinguished place in the next world; and, armed with

these, he can contemplate with perfect indifference all outward forms of

worship.

These and other points which the post-Christian Gnostic sects seem to

have had in common[67] can therefore be accounted for by their common

origin, without accepting the theory of the textual critics that the

Fathers had been deceived by an impostor who had made one document do

duty several times over. Yet until we have the writings of the

heresiarchs actually in our hands, we must always be in doubt as to how

far their opinions have been correctly recorded for us. The

post-Christian Gnostic sects have been compared with great aptness to

the Protestant bodies which have sprung up outside the Catholic Church

since the German Reformation[68], and the analogy in most respects seems

to be perfect. Yet it would probably be extremely difficult for a bishop

of the Church of Rome or of that of England to give within the compass

of an heresiology like those quoted above an account of the tenets of

the different sects in England and America, without making grave and

serious mistakes in points of detail. The difficulty would arise from

want of first-hand knowledge, in spite of the invention of printing

having made the dissemination of information on such subjects a thousand

times more general than in sub-Apostolic times, and of the fact that the

modern sects, unlike their predecessors, do not seek to keep their

doctrines secret. But the analogy shows us another cause of error. The

“Free Churches,” as they are called in modern parlance, have from the

outset shown themselves above all things fissiparous, and it is enough

to mention the names of Luther, Zwingli, Calvin, Socinus, Wesley, and

Chalmers to show how hopelessly at variance the teachings of the

founders of sects at first sight are. But in spite of this, there seems

to have been always a sort of fluidity of doctrine among them, and

hardly any of the Nonconformist sects now profess the dogmas with which

they first came into existence. The changes in this respect, however,

never involve the borrowing of new tenets from sources external to them

all, but seem to be brought about by a sort of interfiltration between

one sect and another. Thus, for example, for many centuries after the

Reformation the majority of the dissident sects which rejected all

connection with the Catholic Church were among the stoutest defenders of

the Divinity of Jesus, and the Socinians who held the contrary opinion

were in an entirely negligible minority. At the present day, however,

the tendency seems to run the other way, and many Nonconformist bodies

are leaning towards Unitarian doctrines, although few of them probably

have ever heard the name of Socinus. A similar tendency to

interpenetration of doctrines early showed itself among the Gnostics;

and there can be little doubt that it sometimes led to a fusion or

amalgamation between sects of widely differing origin. Hence it is not

extraordinary that certain tenets are sometimes recorded by the Fathers

as peculiar to one Gnostic leader and sometimes to another, and to trace

accurately their descent, it would be necessary to know the exact point

in the history of each sect at which such tenets appeared. But the

Fathers seldom thought of distinguishing between the opinions of an

heresiarch and those of his successors, and the literary habits of the

time were not in favour of accurate quotation of documents or even of

names[69]. This forms the chief difficulty in dealing with the history

of the Gnostic teaching, and although the discovery of fresh documents

contemporary with those we now possess would undoubtedly throw

additional light upon the subject, it is probable that it will never be

entirely overcome.

Generally speaking, however, Gnosticism played a most important part in

the history of Christianity. Renan’s view that it was a disease which,

like croup, went near to strangling the infant Church is often

quoted[70]; but in the long run it is probable that Gnosticism was on

the whole favourable to her development. In religion, sentiment often

plays a larger part than reason; and any faith which would enable men of

weight and influence to continue the religious practices in which they

had been brought up, with at the outset but slight modification, was

sure of wide acceptance. There seems no doubt that the earlier Gnostics

continued to attend the mysteries of the Chthonian deities in Greece and

of their Oriental analogues, Osiris, Attis, Adonis, and the like

elsewhere, while professing to place upon what they there saw a

Christian interpretation[71]. Here they acted like the little leaven

that leaveneth the whole lump, and this did much to spread the knowledge

of the new faith among those spiritually-minded Gentiles, who would

never have felt any interest in Christianity so long as it remained

merely a branch of Judaism[72]. Most of them, moreover, sooner or later

abandoned their Gnosticism, and became practising members of the

Catholic Church, who sometimes went a long way to meet them. As Renan

has said, none of them ever relapsed into Paganism[73], and in this way

the so-called heresies became at once the feeders of orthodox

Christianity and its richest recruiting-ground[74]. They offered in fact

an easy road by which the wealthy, the learned, and the highly-placed

could pass from Paganism to Christianity without suffering the

inconvenience imposed upon the first followers of the Apostles.

On the other hand, it may be argued that the Church in receiving such

recruits lost much of that simplicity of doctrine and practice to which

it had hitherto owed her rapid and unvarying success. The Gnostics

brought with them into their new faith the use of pictures and statues,

of incense, and of all the paraphernalia of the worship of the heathen

gods. Baptism which, among the Jewish community in which Christianity

was born, was an extremely simple rite, to be performed by anybody and

entirely symbolical in its character[75], became an elaborate ceremony

which borrowed the name as well as many of the adjuncts of initiation

into the Mysteries. So, too, the Agape (love-feast) or common meal,

which in pre-Christian times was, as we have seen, common to all Greek

religious associations unconnected with the State, was transformed by

the Gnostics into a rite surrounded by the same provisions for secrecy

and symbolizing the same kind of sacrifice as those which formed the

central point of the mystic drama at Eleusis and elsewhere. Both these

sacraments, as they now came to be called, were thought to be invested

with a magical efficacy, and to demand for their proper celebration a

priesthood as exclusive as, and a great deal more ambitious than, that

of Eleusis or Alexandria. The daring speculations of the Gnostics as to

the nature of the godhead and the origin of the world also forced upon

the Catholics the necessity of formulating her views on these points and

making adhesion to them a test of membership[76]. To do so was possibly

to choose the smaller of two evils, yet it can hardly be denied that the

result of the differences of opinion thus aroused was to deluge the

world with blood and to stay the progress of human knowledge for more

than a thousand years[77]. It is said that if Gnosticism had not been

forcibly suppressed, as it was directly the Christian priesthood

obtained a share in the government of the State, Christianity would have

been nothing but a battle-ground for warring sects, and must have

perished from its own internal dissensions. It may be so; but it is at

least as possible that, if left unmolested, many of the wilder sects

would soon have withered away from their own absurdity, and that none of

the others would have been able to endure for long. In this respect

also, the history of the post-Reformation sects offers an interesting

parallel.

Be that as it may, it is plain that the Catholic Church, in devoting her

energies to the suppression of the Gnostic heresies, lost much of the

missionary power which till then had seemed all-conquering. During the

two centuries which elapsed between the siege of Jerusalem under

Vespasian and the accession of Aurelian, the Church had raised herself

from the position of a tiny Jewish sect to that of the foremost among

the many religions of the Roman Empire. A brief but bloody persecution

under Diocletian convinced the still Pagan Emperors of the impossibility

of suppressing Christianity by force, and the alliance which they were

thus driven to conclude with it enabled the Church to use successfully

against the Gnostics the arm which had proved powerless against the

Catholics[78]. Yet the triumph was a costly one, and was in its turn

followed by a schism which rent the Church in twain more effectually

than the Gnostic speculations could ever have done. In the West, indeed,

the Latin Church was able to convert the barbarians who extinguished the

Western half of the Roman Empire; but in the East, Christianity had to

give way to a younger and more ardent faith. How far this was due to the

means taken by the Church to suppress Gnosticism must still be a matter

of speculation, but it is certain that after her first triumph over

heresy she gained no more great victories.

Footnote 1:

Col. ii. 18.

Footnote 2:

Lightfoot, _St Paul’s Epistle to the Colossians_, pp. 90 _sqq._

Footnote 3:

So A. Jülicher in _Encyc. Bibl._ _s.v._ Gnosis.

Footnote 4:

Irenaeus, _op. cit._ Bk I. c. 23, p. 214, Harvey. Salmon in _Dict. of

Christian Biog._ _s.v._ Nicolaitans, thinks this an idea peculiar to

Irenaeus alone and not to be found in the older source from which he

drew his account of the other Gnostics.

Footnote 5:

The Canonical Apocalypse was probably written after the siege of

Jerusalem by Titus in 70 A.D., while the first unmistakable mention we

have of St John’s Gospel is by Theophilus of Antioch a hundred years

later. Earlier quotations from it are anonymous, _i.e._ they give the

words of the Gospel as in the A.V. but without referring them to any

specified author. See Duchesne, _Early Christian Church_, Eng. ed. pp.

102, 192.

Footnote 6:

Hegesippus, quoted by Eusebius, _Hist. Eccl._ Bk IV. c. 22, says that

the Church was untroubled by heresy until the reign of Trajan.

Footnote 7:

Hegesippus (see last note) in his account of the martyrdom of “James

the Brother of the Lord,” _op. cit._ Bk II. c. 23.

Footnote 8:

See Schmiedel, _Encyc. Bibl._ _s.v._ Community of Goods. Cf. Lucian,

_de Mort. Peregrini_, c. XIII, and Mozley’s comments in _Dict.

Christian Biog._ _s.v._ Lucianus.

Footnote 9:

_Maran atha._ See _Epistle of Barnabas_, c. XXI.

Footnote 10:

Winwood Reade, _op. cit._ pp. 237 _sqq._

Footnote 11:

Eugène de Faye, “Formation d’un Doctrine de Dieu au IIme Siècle,”

_R.H.R._ t. LXIII. (1911), p. 9. He quotes Harnack in his support.

Footnote 12:

Mark xi. 1.

Footnote 13:

On the ignorance of the first Christian writers, see de Faye, _op.

cit._ p. 4.

Footnote 14:

Origen, _cont. Celsum_, Bk III. c. 12. Cf. Krüger, _La Grande

Encyclopédie_, Paris, _s.v._ Gnosticisme.

Footnote 15:

“Those which say they are Jews, but are not”; Rev. ii. 9; _ibid._ iii.

9. The _Clementine Homilies_, though of much later date, never speak

of the Christians otherwise than as Jews. Cf. Duchesne, _Early

Christian Church_, p. 12.

Footnote 16:

Acts viii. 1.

Footnote 17:

Renan (_L’Antéchrist_, p. 511, and note 1) gives a passage, which he

thinks is from Tacitus, showing that Titus aimed at the suppression of

the Christians as well as the Jews. Doubtless many Christians perished

in the punitive measures taken in the Ist century against the Jews in

Antioch and elsewhere. Cf. Josephus, _Wars of the Jews_, Bk VII. c. 3;

Eusebius, _H. E._ Bk III. cc. 12, 17, 19, 20. It was the persecution

by the fanatical Jews that compelled the flight of the Christians to

Pella shortly before the siege. See Eusebius, Bk III. c. 5; Epiph.

_Haer._ XXIX. c. 7, p. 239, Oehler. The episode of the “Woman clothed

with the Sun” of the Canonical Apocalypse is supposed by some to refer

to this.

Footnote 18:

So that the members of the little Church of Pella who retained the

name of Jews gradually ceased to be regarded as orthodox by the other

Christian communities and were called Ebionites. See Renan,

_L’Antéchrist_, p. 548. Cf. Fuller in _Dict. Christian Biog._ _s.v._

Ebionites for authorities. The connection that Fuller would find

between the Essenes and the Ebionites seems to rest on little proof.

Footnote 19:

Thus Mgr Duchesne, _op. cit._ p. 14, says that “St Paul was a Jew by

birth, imbued with the exclusiveness and disdainful spirit which

inspired his race and influenced all their dealings with other

nations.”

Footnote 20:

Many of the Sicarii and other fanatics managed to escape before the

catastrophe of the First Jewish War to Egypt and the Cyrenaica, where

they continued to commit outrages and make rebellion until they

brought on themselves and their co-religionists the wrath of the

Romans. See Josephus, _Wars_, Bk VII. cc. 10, 11. Cf. Renan,

_L’Antéchrist_, p. 539; _id._, _Les Évangiles_, p. 369.

Footnote 21:

Abel’s _Orphica_, Frgs. 243-248, especially the quotation from

Nigidius.

Footnote 22:

See Chapter II, _supra_.

Footnote 23:

So Renan, _L’Antéchrist_, p. 300, says that the Synoptic Gospels

probably first took shape in the Church at Pella. Thus he explains the

so-called “little Apocalypse” of Matthew xxiv., Mark xiii., and Luke

xxi. Cf. _ibid._, p. 296 and note. For the symbolic construction

placed upon them by the Gnostics, see Hatch, _H. L._, p. 75.

Footnote 24:

Hegesippus, who probably wrote about 150 A.D., speaks of Thebuthis,

Dositheus, and others as leaders of early sects. Eusebius, _Hist.

Eccl._ Bk IV. c. 22, and Origen (_cont. Cels._ Bk VI. c. 11) make this

last a contemporary of Simon Magus. The _Clementine Homilies_ (Bk II.

c. 24), from whom both authors may have derived their information,

have a long story about Dositheus being with Simon a follower of John

the Baptist, and disputing with Simon the headship of the sect. From

presumably other sources, Hegesippus speaks of the Essenes, the

Masbothoeans and the Hemero-baptists, for which last see Chapter XIII,

_infra_, as pre-Christian sects.

Footnote 25:

Winwood Reade, _op. cit._ p. 244. Probably this is what is meant by

Gibbon when he says (_Decline and Fall_, Bury’s ed. III. p. 153, n.

54) that no future bishop of Avila is likely to imitate Priscillian by

turning heretic, because the income of the see is 20,000 ducats a

year.

Footnote 26:

_Apostolical Constitutions_, Bk II. cc. 45, 46, 47. Harnack,

_Expansion of Christianity_, Eng. ed. II. p. 98 n. 1, gives the date

of this work as “middle of the 2nd century.” Duchesne, _op. cit._ p.

109, thinks it is derived from the _Didache_ which he puts not later

than Trajan.

Footnote 27:

_Apost. Const._ Bk II. c. 26: “He (_i.e._ the bishop) is your ruler

and governor; he is your king and potentate; he is next after God,

your earthly divinity, who has a right to be honoured by you.”

Footnote 28:

Lucian, _Proteus Peregrinus_, _passim_; _Acts of Paul and Thekla_;

_Acts of Peter of Alexandria_.

Footnote 29:

Clement of Rome, _First Epistle to the Corinthians_, c. 44.

Footnote 30:

So Irenaeus, _op. cit._ Bk I. c. 26, pp. 219, 220, Harvey, says it was

the desire to become a διδάσκαλος or teacher that drove Tatian, once a

hearer of Justin Martyr’s, into heresy. Hegesippus, _ubi cit._

_supra_, says that Thebuthis first corrupted the Church, on account of

his not being made a bishop. For the same accusation in the cases of

Valentinus and Marcion, see Chapters IX and XI, _infra_.

Footnote 31:

Celsus _apud_ Origen (_op. cit._ Bk III. cc. 10, 11) says: “Christians

at first were few in number, and all held like opinions, but when they

increased to a great multitude, they were divided and separated, each

wishing to have his own individual party; for this was their object

from the beginning”—a contention which Origen rebuts.

Footnote 32:

Thus in Egypt it was almost exclusively the lower classes which

embraced Christianity at the outset. See Amélineau, “Les Actes Coptes

du martyre de St Polycarpe” in _P.S.B.A._ vol. X. (1888), p. 392.

Julian (_Cyr._ VI. p. 206) says that under Tiberius and Claudius there

were no converts of rank.

Footnote 33:

Thus Cerinthus, who is made by tradition the opponent of St John, is

said to have been a Jew and to have been trained in the doctrines of

Philo at Alexandria (Theodoret, _Haer. Fab._ Bk II. § 3). Cf. Neander,

_Ch. Hist._ (Eng. ed.) vol. II. pp. 42-47. Neander says the same thing

about Basilides (_op. cit._ p. 47 and note) and Valentinus (p. 71),

although it is difficult to discover any authority for the statement

other than the Jewish features in their doctrines. There is more

evidence for the statement regarding Marcus, the heresiarch and

magician whom Irenaeus (_op. cit._ Bk I. c. 7) accuses of the

seduction of Christian women, apparently in his own time, since the

words of Marcus’ ritual, which the Bishop of Lyons quotes, are in much

corrupted Hebrew, and the Jewish Cabala was used by him. Renan’s view

(_Marc Aurèle_, pp. 139 _sqq._) that Christianity in Egypt never

passed through the Judaeo-Christian stage may in part account for the

desire of Jewish converts there to set up schools of their own.

Footnote 34:

For Marcion, see Chapter XI, _infra_. Summary accounts of the

doctrines of other Gnostics mentioned are given by Irenaeus and

Hippolytus in the works quoted. See also the _Dict. of Christian

Biog._, under their respective names.

Footnote 35:

The lesser heresiologists, such as Philaster of Brescia, St Augustine,

the writer who is known as Praedestinatus, the author of the tract

_Adversus omnes Haereses_ wrongly ascribed to Tertullian, and the

other writers included in the first volume of Oehler’s _Corpus

Haereseologici_, Berlin, 1856, as well as writers like Eusebius, all

copy from one or other of these sources. The _Excerpta Theodoti_

appended to the works of Clement of Alexandria are on a different

footing, but their effect at the time spoken of in the text was not

appreciated. Cf. Salmon in _Dict. Christian Biog._ _s.v._ Valentinus.

Footnote 36:

Bouché-Leclercq, _L’Intolérance Religieuse et Politique_, Paris, 1912,

p. 140.

Footnote 37:

Ammianus Marcellinus, Bk XXII. c. 5, § 4.

Footnote 38:

An excellent and concise account of the discovery and the subsequent

controversy as to the authorship of the book is given by Salmon in the

_Dict. Christian Biog._ _s.v._ Hippolytus Romanus. For Mgr Duchesne’s

theory that Hippolytus was a schismatic Pope, see his _Hist. Christian

Church_, pp. 227-233.

Footnote 39:

Salmon’s position is set out by him in _Hermathena_, Dublin, 1885, pp.

389 _sqq._ For Stähelin’s, see his tractate _Die Gnostische Quellen

Hippolyts_, Leipzig, 1890, in Harnack’s _Texte und Untersuchungen_.

Both are skilfully summarized by de Faye in his _Introduction à

l’Étude du Gnosticisme_, Paris, 1903, pp. 25 _sqq._

Footnote 40:

De Faye does not accept Stähelin’s contention as to the forgery, but

his conclusion as to the date is as stated in the text. See

_Introduction_, etc. pp. 68, 71.

Footnote 41:

Tertullian, _Scorpiace_, c. 1.

Footnote 42:

Neander, _Ch. Hist._ (Eng. ed.), I. p. 208, quotes a case from St

Augustine which I have not been able to verify.

Footnote 43:

Gibbon, _Decline and Fall_, II. p. 110 and note 144 (Bury’s ed.). For

the search which the Christian emperors directed to be made for the

heretics’ books, see Eusebius, _Vita Constantini_, Bk III. cc. 64, 65.

Footnote 44:

The actual transcription and translation were made by Maurice

Schwartze, a young German who was sent over here to study the

documents in the British Museum at the expense of the King of Prussia.

He died after the completion of his task, and before the book could be

printed.

Footnote 45:

Amélineau’s transcription and translation appeared in the _Notices et

Extraits_, etc. of the Académie des Inscriptions, t. XXIX. pt 2

(Paris, 1891). He has also published a translation into French without

text of the _Pistis Sophia_ (Paris, 1895). Dr Carl Schmidt, of the

University of Berlin, has published translations into German of both

works under the title _Koptisch-Gnostische Schriften_, Bd I., Leipzig,

1905. None of these versions are entirely satisfactory, and it is much

to be wished that an authoritative edition of the two works could be

put forward by English scholars. The present writer gave a short

history and analysis of them in the _Scottish Review_ for 1893 under

the title “Some Heretic Gospels.”

Footnote 46:

Clement was so far from being a heresiologist that he has not escaped

the reproach of being himself a heretic. He repeatedly speaks in

praise of the “true Gnostic,” meaning thereby the perfect Christian,

and although this is probably a mere matter of words, it seems to have

induced Photius in the IXth century to examine his writings with a

jealous eye. The result was that, as M. Courdaveaux points out

(_R.H.R._ 1892, p. 293 and note), he found him guilty of teaching that

matter was eternal, the Son a simple creature of the Father, the

Incarnation only an appearance, that man’s soul entered several bodies

in succession, and that several worlds were created before that of

Adam. All these are Gnostic opinions, and it may be that if we had all

Clement’s books in our hands, as had Photius, we might confirm M.

Courdaveaux’s judgment, as does apparently Mgr Duchesne. Cf. his

_Hist. of Christian Ch._ pp. 244, 245.

Footnote 47:

Cf. A. C. McGiffert, _Prolegomena to the Church History of Eusebius_

(Schaff and Wace’s Nicene Library), Oxford, 1890, vol. I. p. 179 and

note.

Footnote 48:

Of the heresies mentioned in the _Philosophumena_ only two, viz. that

of Simon Magus and that of those whom Hippolytus calls the Sethiani,

do not admit, either expressly or by implication, the divinity of

Jesus. This may be accounted for by what has been said above as to

both being pre-Christian in origin.

Footnote 49:

_E.g._ Irenaeus, _op. cit._ Bk I. c. 1, I. p. 9, Harvey. Here he is

called ὅμοιος τε καὶ ἴσος τῷ προβαλόντι, “like and equal to him who

had sent him forth.” There is certainly here no allusion to

“begetting” in the ordinary sense of the word.

Footnote 50:

As in the epithet of Persephone in the Orphic Hymn quoted above. See

Chapter IV, _supra_. The unanimity with which all post-Christian

Gnostics accepted the superhuman nature of Jesus seems to have struck

Harnack. See his _What is Christianity?_ Eng. ed. 1904, pp. 209, 210.

Footnote 51:

_Iliad_ I. ll. 560 _sqq._; IV. ll. 57, 330; XIV. ll. 320 _sqq._

Footnote 52:

_Odyssey_ XI. ll. 600 _sqq._; Plutarch, _Life of Pelopidas_, c. XVI.

Footnote 53:

Plutarch, _de Is. et Os._ c. LXXI.

Footnote 54:

_Ibid._ cc. XXV., XXVII., XXX.

Footnote 55:

Probably this was one of the reasons why the Mysteries which showed

the death of a god had in Greece to be celebrated in secret. See

Diodorus’ remark (Bk V. c. 77, § 3) that the things which the Greeks

only handed down in secret were by the Cretans concealed from no one.

Footnote 56:

Hippolytus, _op. cit._ Bk VI. c. 19, p. 265, Cruice.

Footnote 57:

Irenaeus, _op. cit._ Bk I. c. 19, II. p. 200, Harvey.

Footnote 58:

ἀμορφία. Hippolytus, _op. cit._ Bk VII. c. 27, p. 366, Cruice.

Footnote 59:

Irenaeus, _op. cit._ Bk I. c. 18, p. 197, Harvey. Hippolytus, _op.

cit._ Bk VII. c. 28, p. 368, Cruice.

Footnote 60:

Hippolytus, _op. cit._ Bk VIII. c. 8.

Footnote 61:

Irenaeus, _op. cit._ Bk I. c. 1, § 13, pp. cxli and 61, Harvey.

Footnote 62:

_Ibid._ Bk I. c. 1, § 31, pp. cxli and 62, Harvey.

Footnote 63:

Irenaeus, _op. cit._ Bk I. c. 19, § 3, p. 202, Harvey; Hippolytus,

_op. cit._ Bk IV. c. 24, p. 225, Cruice; Tertullian, _Scorpiace_, c.

I.

Footnote 64:

For the accusation against the Christians, see Athenagoras,

_Apologia_, cc. III., XXXI.; Justin Martyr, _First Apol._ c. XXVI. For

that against the Jews, Strack, _Le Sang et la fausse Accusation du

Meurtre Rituel_, Paris, 1893. For that against the Freemasons, “Devil

Worship and Freemasonry,” _Contemporary Review_ for 1896.

Footnote 65:

See n. 1, _supra_. So Eusebius speaks of the Simonians receiving

baptism and slipping into the Church without revealing their secret

tenets, _Hist. Eccl._ Bk II. c. 1.

Footnote 66:

Revillout, _Vie et Sentences de Secundus_, Paris, 1873, p. 3, n. 1.

Footnote 67:

Amélineau, _Le Gnosticisme Égyptien_, p. 75, thus enumerates them: the

doctrine of emanation, an unknown [_i.e._ an inaccessible and

incomprehensible] God, the resemblance of the three worlds, the

aeonology of Simon, and a common cosmology. To this may be added the

inherent malignity of matter and the belief in salvation by knowledge.

See Krüger, _La Grande Encyclopédie_, _s.v._ Gnosticisme.

Footnote 68:

Renan, _Mare Aurèle_, p. 114.

Footnote 69:

Witness the confusion between Ennoia and Epinoia in Chapter VI, vol.

I. p. 180, n. 4, _supra_, and between Saturnilus and Saturninus in

this chapter, p. 9. So Irenaeus and others record the opinions of an

associate of Marcus whom they call “_Colarbasus_,” a name which modern

criticism has shown to be a mistake for קול ארבע Kol-arba, “The Voice

of the Four” or the Supreme Tetrad. See Renan, _Mare Aurèle_, p. 129;

Hort in _Dict. Christian Biog._ _s.h.v._ So Clement of Alexandria,

_Protrept._ c. II. mistakes Evoe, the mystic cry of the Bacchantes,

for the Eve of Genesis.

Footnote 70:

Renan, _L’Église Chrétienne_, p. 140.

Footnote 71:

Hippolytus, _op. cit._ Bk V. c. 9, p. 177, Cruice.

Footnote 72:

As in the case of Clement of Alexandria, who seems to have been

initiated into most of the heathen mysteries then current. It is to be

noted, too, that Origen, although he speaks of the Ophites as an

insignificant sect (see Chapter VIII, _infra_), yet professes to know

all about their secret opinions.

Footnote 73:

Renan, _Marc Aurèle_, p. 139.

Footnote 74:

Thus Ambrose of Milan had been before his conversion a Valentinian,

Epiphanius a Nicolaitan. See Eusebius, _H.E._ Bk VI. c. 18; Epiph.

_Haer._ XXVI. c. 17, p. 198, Oehler.

Footnote 75:

It could be even self-administered, as in the _Acts of Paul and

Thekla_, where Thekla baptizes herself in the arena. See Tischendorf’s

text. The _Clementine Homilies_ (Bk XIV. c. 1) show that it could be

immediately followed by the Eucharist without any intermediate rite or

preparation. Contrast with this the elaborate ceremonies described by

Cyril of Jerusalem, where the white-robed band of converts after a

long catechumenate, including fasting and the communication of secret

doctrines and passwords, approach on Easter Eve the doors of the

church where the lights turned darkness into day. See Hatch, _H. L._

pp. 297, 299.

Footnote 76:

Duchesne, _Hist. Christian Ch._ p. 32; Harnack, _What is

Christianity?_ Eng. ed. p. 210.

Footnote 77:

As Hatch, _H. L._ pp. 274-279, has pointed out, the term όμοοὐσιος,

which led to so much shedding of Christian blood, first occurs among

the post-Christian Gnostics, and led in turn to most of the wranglings

about “substance,” “person,” and the other metaphysical distinctions

and their result in “strife and murder, the devastation of fair

fields, the flame of fire and sword” (_ibid._ p. 279). For the

possibilities of Greek science, had it not been opposed by the Church,

see _ibid._ p. 26.

Footnote 78:

See the edict of Constantine, which Eusebius (_Vit. Constantini_, cc.

LXIV., LXV.) quotes with unholy glee, prohibiting the Gnostics from

presuming to assemble together either publicly or privately, and

commanding that their “houses of prayer” should be confiscated and

handed over to the Catholic Church. Eusebius (_ibid._ c. LXVI.) says

that the result of this was that the “savage beasts crept secretly

into the Church,” and continued to disseminate their doctrines by

stealth. Perhaps such a result was to be expected.

CHAPTER VIII

POST-CHRISTIAN GNOSTICS: THE OPHITES

Although the Ophites were one of the most widely-spread and in some

respects the most interesting of the heretical sects which came to light

after the foundation of the Christian Church, we know nothing at first

hand about their origin. Philastrius, or Philaster of Brescia, writing

about 380 A.D., includes them among those “who taught heresies before

the Coming of Christ[79]”; but the phrase does not perhaps bear its

apparent meaning, and the late date at which he wrote makes it unlikely

that he possessed any exclusive evidence on the point. A more plausible

tradition, which is common to St Augustine[80], to the tractate _Against

All Heresies_ which passes under the name of Tertullian[81], and to the

similar one attributed to St Jerome[82], is that the Ophites derived

their doctrines from Nicolaus or Nicolas of Antioch, the deacon

mentioned in the Acts[83], and that they are therefore alluded to under

the name of Nicolaitans[84] in the address to the Church of Ephesus in

the Canonical Apocalypse. Origen, on the other hand, in his _Discourse

against Celsus_ says that they boasted of one Euphrates as their

founder[85]; while Hippolytus declares that their tenets were said by

themselves to be due to “the very numerous discourses which were handed

down by James the brother of the Lord to Mariamne[86].” From which

contradictory statements we may gather that the “heresy” of the Ophites

was, even as early as 230 A.D., a very old one, which may have appeared

even before Christianity began to show its power, and that it was

probably born in Asia Minor and owed much to the Pagan religions there

practised and little or nothing to any dominant personality as did the

systems of Simon Magus and the heresies treated of in the succeeding

chapters.

It is also probable that between the time when the Canonical Apocalypse

was written and that of Origen and Hippolytus[87], the Ophites altered

their doctrines more than once. We may not be able to go so far as their

historian, Father Giraud, who thinks that he can distinguish between

their earlier opinions, which he would attribute to the Naassenes or

Ophites[88] described by Hippolytus, and those of a later school to

which he would assign the name of Ophites specially[89]. Yet many of the

Fathers confuse their doctrines with those of the Sethians, the

Cainites, and other sects which seem to have had some distinguishing

features[90]; while Hippolytus, who shows a more critical spirit than

the other heresiologists, says expressly that the other heresies just

named were little different in appearance from this one, being united by

the same spirit of error[91]. The confusion is further increased by his

statement that the Naassenes called themselves Gnostics, although

Carpocrates’ followers, who must have been later in time, are elsewhere

said to be the first to adopt this name[92]. For there was at least one

other sect of heretics who did the same thing, and to whom Epiphanius in

his _Panarion_ attributes, together with a theological and cosmological

system not unlike that hereafter described, mysteries of unnameable

obscenity with which the Ophites were never charged[93]. In this respect

it may be as well to remember the words of Tertullian that the heretics

“know no respect even for their own leaders. Hence it is that

schisms seldom happen among heretics because, even when they exist,

they do not appear; for their very unity is schism. I am greatly in

error,” he continues, “if they do not amongst themselves even

diverge from their own rules, since every man, as it suits his own

temper, modifies the traditions he has received after the same

fashion as did he who handed them down to him, when he moulded them

according to his own free will.... What was allowed to Valentinus is

allowable to the Valentinians, and that is lawful for the

Marcionites which Marcion did, _i.e._ to innovate on the faith

according to his own judgment. In short, all heresies when

investigated are found to be in many particulars disagreeing with

their own authors[94].”

If Tertullian was right, it is idle to expect that after the lapse of

nineteen centuries we can hope to distinguish between the opinions of an

heresiarch and those of his followers who differed from or improved upon

his teaching.

Of the country in which the Ophites first appeared, and where to the

last they had their strongest following, there can, however, be little

doubt. Phrygia, by which is meant the entire central part of Asia Minor

or, to use its modern name, Anatolia, must from its situation have

formed a great meeting-place for different creeds, among which that of

the Jews occupied in the first centuries of our era a prominent place.

Seleucus Nicator had followed the example of Alexander in Egypt in

granting the Jews full rights of citizenship in all his cities, and

Antiochus the Great took even more practical steps towards inducing them

to settle there when he transported thither two thousand Jewish families

from Mesopotamia and Babylon[95]. These Jews of the Eastern Diaspora or

Dispersion had, however, by no means kept whole the faith of their

forefathers, and there seems in consequence to have been less racial

hatred between them and the earlier inhabitants of the country here than

elsewhere[96]. In religious matters, these last, too, seem to have been

little affected by the Euhemerism that had destroyed the faith of the

more sophisticated Greeks, and the orgiastic worship of Cybele, Attis,

and Sabazius found in Phrygia its principal seat. The tendency of the

inhabitants towards religious hysteria was not likely to be lessened by

the settlement in the centre of Asia Minor of the Celtic tribes known as

the Galatae, who had gradually passed under the Roman yoke in the time

of Augustus, but seem long to have retained their Celtic taste for

innovations in religious matters, and to have supplied from the outset

an endless number of heresies to the Church[97]. Moreover, in the Wars

of Succession which followed the death of Alexander, Phrygia had been

bandied about like a shuttlecock between Antigonus and Lysimachus; in

the decadence of the Seleucid house, it had been repeatedly harried by

the pretenders to the Syrian crown; and it had, during the temporary

supremacy of Mithridates and his son-in-law Tigranes, been subject to

the tyranny of the Armenians[98]. Thanks to the policy of these

barbarian kings, it had in great measure been denuded of its

Greek-speaking inhabitants[99], the growth of its towns had been

checked, and the country seems to have been practically divided among a

crowd of dynasts or priest-kings, generally the high-priests of temples

possessing vast landed estates and preserving their importance by the

celebration of yearly festivals. Dr Mahaffy compares these potentates

with the prince-bishops and lordly abbots produced by nearly the same

conditions in mediaeval Europe[100], and Sir William Ramsay’s and Mr

Hogarth’s researches of late years in Anatolia have shown how much truth

there is in the comparison.

The religion practised by these priest-kings throughout the whole of

Asia Minor differed slightly in form, but was one in substance[101]. It

was in effect the worship of the bisexual and mortal gods whom we have

already seen worshipped under varying names in the Eastern basin of the

Mediterranean. These deities, whose alternate appearance as male and

female, infant and adult, could only be explained to Western ears as the

result of incestuous unions, could all on final analysis be reduced to

one great divinity in whom all Nature was contained. The essence of the

Anatolian religion, says Sir William Ramsay, when describing the state

of things that existed in Phrygia immediately before the preaching of St

Paul, was

“the adoration of the life of Nature—that life apparently subject to

death, yet never dying, but reproducing itself in new forms,

different and yet the same. This perpetual self-identity under

varying forms, this annihilation of death through the power of

self-reproduction, was the object of an enthusiastic worship,

characterized by remarkable self-abandonment and immersion in the

divine, by a mixture of obscene symbolism and sublime truths, by

negation of the moral distinctions and family ties that exist in a

more developed society, but do not exist in the free life of Nature.

The mystery of self-reproduction, of eternal unity amid temporary

diversity, is the key to explain all the repulsive legends and

ceremonies that cluster round that worship, and all the manifold

manifestations or diverse embodiments of the ultimate single divine

life that are carved on the rocks of Asia Minor[102].”

Whether the Phrygians of Apostolic times actually saw all these sublime

ideas underlying the religion of their country may be doubted; but it is

fairly certain that at the time in question there was worshipped

throughout Anatolia a divine family comprising a goddess known as the

Mother of the Gods, together with a male deity, who was at once her son,

her spouse, her brother, and sometimes her father[103]. The worship of

this pair, who were in the last resort considered as one bisexual being,

was celebrated in the form of festivals and mystery-plays like those of

the Middle Ages, in which the birth, nuptials, death, and resurrection

of the divinities were acted in dramatic form. At these festivals, the

worshippers gave themselves up to religious excitement alternating

between continence sometimes carried to the extent of self-mutilation on

the part of the men, and hysterical or religious prostitution on the

part of the women[104]. The gathering of foreign merchants and slaves in

the Anatolian cities, and the constant shifting of their inhabitants by

their successive masters, had forced on the votaries of these Phrygian

deities a _theocrasia_ of the most complete kind, and the Phrygian god

and goddess were in turn identified with the deities of Eleusis, of whom

indeed they may have been the prototypes, with the Syrian Aphrodite and

Adonis, with the Egypto-Greek Serapis and Isis, and probably with many

Oriental deities as well[105]. At the same time, their fame and their

worship had spread far beyond Phrygia. The primitive statue of the

goddess of Pessinus, a black stone or baetyl dignified by the name of

the Mother of the Gods, was transported to Rome in the stress of the

Second Punic War and there became the centre of a ritual served by

eunuch priests supported by the State[106]; while, later, her analogue,

the Syrian goddess, whose temple at Hierapolis, according to Lucian,

required a _personnel_ of over three hundred ministrants, became the

object of the special devotion of the Emperor Nero[107]. As with the

Alexandrian divinities, the respect paid to these stranger deities by

the legions carried their worship into every part of the Roman

world[108].

The element which the Jews of Asia contributed to Anatolian religion at

this period was probably more important than has been generally

supposed. M. Cumont’s theory that the epithet of the “Highest” (Ὕψιστος)

often applied to the God of Anatolia and Syria really covers the

personality of Yahweh of Israel rests upon little proof at present[109].

It may be conceded that the tendency to monotheism—or to speak strictly

their hatred for the worshippers of many gods—rooted in the Jews from

the Captivity onwards may at first have done much to hasten the progress

of the _theocrasia_ which was welding all the gods of the Mysteries into

one great God of Nature. But the Babylonian or Oriental Jews, called in

the Talmud and elsewhere the Ten Tribes, probably had some inborn

sympathy with the more or less exalted divinities of the West. Even in

the temple of Jerusalem, Ezekiel sees in his vision “women weeping for

Tammuz[110],” while Jeremiah complains of the Jews making cakes to the

Queen of Heaven, which seems to be another name for the Mother of the

Gods[111]. The feminine side of the Anatolian worship can therefore have

come to them as no new thing. Perhaps it was due to this that they so

soon fell away from their ancestral faith, and that, in the words of the

Talmud, “the baths and wines of Phrygia separated the Ten Tribes from

their brethren[112].” That their collection of money for the Temple in

Roman times was due not so much to any religious motive, as to some of

the financial operations in which the Jews were always engaging, Cicero

hints with fair plainness in his Oration in defence of Flaccus[113].

They seem, too, to have intermarried freely with the Greek citizens,

while the sons of these mixed marriages did not undergo the circumcision

which the Jews of the Western Dispersion demanded not only from native

Jews but also from proselytes of alien blood[114].

The Jews also brought with them into Phrygia superstitions or

side-beliefs to which they were probably much more firmly attached than

to their national religion. The practice of magic had always been

popular among the Chosen People as far back as the time of Saul, and the

bowls inscribed with spells against enchantments and evil spirits form

almost the only relics which they have left in the mounds which mark

their settlement at Hilleh on the site of the ancient Babylon[115]. From

this and other evidence, it would seem that the Babylonian Jews had

borrowed from their Chaldaean captors many of their views as to the

importance of the Name in magic, especially when used for the purposes

of exorcism or of spells; that they thought the name of their national

god Yahweh particularly efficacious; and that the different names of God

used in the Old Testament were supposed, according to a well-known rule

in magic, to be of greater efficiency as the memory of their meaning and

actual significance died out among them[116]. The Babylonian Jews,

moreover, as is evident from the Book of Daniel, no sooner found

themselves among the well-to-do citizens of a great city than they

turned to the professional practice of divination and of those curious

arts whereby they could make a living from the credulity of their

Gentile neighbours without the manual labour always dreaded by

them[117]. Hence Phrygia, like the rest of Asia Minor during the

Apostolic Age, was full of strolling Jewish sorcerers who undertook for

money to cast out devils, to effect and destroy enchantments, to send

and interpret dreams, and to manufacture love philtres[118]. That in

doing so they made great use of the name of their national deity seems

plain from Origen’s remark that “not only do those belonging to the

Jewish nation employ in their prayers to God and in the exorcising of

demons the words: God of Abraham and God of Isaac and God of Jacob, but

so also do most of those who occupy themselves with magical rites. For

there is found in treatises on magic in many countries such an

invocation of God and assumption of the divine name, as implies a

familiar use of it by these men in their dealings with demons[119].”

This is abundantly borne out by the spells preserved for us by the Magic

Papyri before mentioned, where the expressions “God of Abraham,” “God of

Isaac,” “God of Jacob” constantly occur. One spell given above contains,

as we have seen, along with many unfamiliar expressions drawn from

Greek, Persian, Egyptian, and even Sumerian sources, the words “Blessed

be the Lord God of Abraham[120],” and in nearly every one do we find the

Tetragrammaton or four-lettered name of God transliterated in the A.V.

Jehovah, either with or without some of the other Divine names used in

the Old Testament. The names of the angels Gabriel, Michael, and Raphael

given in the Old Testament and the Apocrypha are also common in all this

literature[121].

Did the Babylonian Jews bring with them into Phrygia any theory of the

universe other than the direct and unfettered rule of Jehovah and the

creation of the world from nothing, which they gathered from their

sacred books? There is little evidence on the point, save some

expressions of doubtful import in the Magic Papyri[122] and the

statement of Origen that “the name Sabaoth, and Adonai and the other

names treated with so much reverence among the Hebrews ... belong to a

secret theology which refers to the Framer of all things[123].” It might

be possible to deduce from this that the elaborate system known as the

Cabala or secret tradition of the Jews was already in existence[124].

This system, on its theoretical or speculative side, attempts to explain

the existence of the physical universe by postulating a whole series of

intermediate powers emanating from the Supreme Being of whom they are

the attributes or names; while, on the other or “practical,” it

professes to perform wonders and to reveal mysteries by a childish

juggling with letters in the shape of anagrams and acrostics or with

their numerical values[125]. As has been said above, follies of this

last-named kind were unknown neither to the later Orphics nor to the

primitive Church, and might well be thought to have been acquired by the

Jews during their stay in Babylon, where the Semitic inhabitants seem

from a very early date and for magical reasons to have used numbers

instead of letters in writing the names of their gods[126]. It would not

have been difficult for them to have acquired at the same time from the

Persian masters of Babylon the doctrine of emanation instead of creation

which is to be found in the Zend Avesta as well as in all the

post-Christian Gnostic systems. But there are other channels besides the

Anatolian religion through which these ideas might have come into the

West[127], and it will be better not to lay any stress upon this. That

the Cabala in the complete form in which it appears in the books known

as the _Sepher Jetzirah_ and the _Sepher Zohar_ does not go further back

than the VIth or VIIth century of our era, seems to be the opinion of

all those best qualified to judge in the matter. M. Isidore Loeb, who

has given the most coherent and compact summary of Cabalistic teaching

that has appeared of late years, finds its germs in Babylonian Judaism

at about the same period which saw the blossoming of the Christian

Gnostic sects, without going so far as to derive either of the later

doctrines from the other[128].

However this may be, there is a fair consensus of opinion among the

Fathers of the Church as to the doctrines current among those whom, for

reasons to be presently seen, they called the Ophites or worshippers of

the Serpent. The aim of the sect seems to have been to produce an

eclectic system which should reconcile the religious traditions current

from time immemorial in Western Asia with the worship of the Hellenized

gods of Asia Minor, and the teachings of the already powerful Christian

Church. With this view they went back to what is probably the earliest

philosophical theory of the origin of the universe, and declared that

before anything was, there existed God, but God conceived as an infinite

ocean of divinity, too great and too remote to be apprehended by man’s

intelligence, of whom and of whose attributes nothing could be known or

said, and who could only be likened to a boundless sea. Something like

this was the view of the earliest inhabitants of Babylonia, who declared

that before heaven or earth or the gods came into being there was

nothing but a vast waste of waters[129]. At some time or another, the

same idea passed into Egypt, when the Egyptians attributed the beginning

of things to Nu or the primaeval deep[130]; and it was probably the

spread of this tradition into Ionia which induced Thales of Miletus, the

earliest of the Ionian philosophers, to assert that water was the first

of all things[131]. This unknowable and inaccessible power, the Ophites

declared to be ineffable or impossible to name, and he was only referred

to by them as Bythos or the Deep. The same idea and the same name were

adopted by most of the later Gnostics[132].

From this unknowable principle or Father (Πατὴρ ἄγνωστος) there shone

forth, according to the Ophites, a Primordial Light, infinite and

incorruptible, which is the Father of all things subsequent to him[133].

Here they may have been inspired, not by the Babylonian, but by its

derivative, the Jewish tradition given in the Book of Genesis[134]. But

this Light was in effect, though not in name, the chief god of their

system, and in Asia Minor the gods had never perhaps been imagined as

existing in any but human form. Accordingly they described this Light as

the First Man, meaning thereby no terrestrial creature, but a heavenly

or archetypal man in whose likeness mankind was afterwards made[135].

From him came forth a second Light sometimes called his Ennoia or

Thought, which expression seems to cover the idea that this Second Man

or Son of Man, by both which names he was known to the Ophites, was not

begotten in the ordinary way of mortals, but was produced from the First

Man as a thought or concept is formed in the brain[136]. Or we may, to

take another metaphor, regard this Ennoia as the rays of light which

emanate or flow forth from a lamp or other source of light, but which

have no independent existence and still remain connected with their

parent. Such was the Ophite idea with regard to the two great Lights or

the First and Second Man whom they refused to consider as separate,

giving them both the name of Adamas, or the Unconquered, a classical

epithet of the Hades already identified at Eleusis with Dionysos[137].

They also called them, as will be seen later, the Father-and-Son. In

this, perhaps, they did not go outside the conception of the Anatolian

religion, which always represented the Divine Son as the spouse of the

goddess who gave him birth, and in this way eternally begetting himself.

Thus, the Phrygian goddess Cybele under the name of Agdistis was said to

be violently enamoured of Atys who was in effect her own son[138]. The

same idea was familiar to the Egyptians, among whom more than one god is

described as the “bull (_i.e._ male or husband) of his mother,” and it

may thus have passed into the Alexandrian religion, where Horus was, as

we have seen, often given instead of Osiris as the lover of Isis[139].

At Eleusis it was more modestly concealed under the myth which made

Dionysos or Hades at once the ravisher of Persephone and her son by Zeus

in serpent form—a myth which is summed up in the mystic phrase preserved

by Clement of Alexandria that “The bull is the father of the serpent,

and the serpent the father of the bull[140].”

Thus the Ophites accounted for the divinity who was in effect their

Supreme God, the still higher Bythos, as we have seen, being put in the

background as too awful for human consideration[141]. But it was still

necessary to make manifest the feminine aspect of the deity which was

always very prominent in Asia Minor. The Mother of the Gods, known as Ma

in Lydia, Cybele in Phrygia proper, Artemis at Ephesus, the unnamed

Syrian goddess at Hierapolis, and Aphrodite in Cyprus and

elsewhere[142], was in the early Christian centuries the most prominent

person in the Anatolian pantheon, a fact which Sir William Ramsay would

attribute to the matriarchate, _Mutterrecht_, or custom of descent in

the female line, which he thinks indigenous to Asia Minor. In the

earliest Phrygian religion there seems little doubt that the supreme

goddess was originally considered to be bisexual, and capable of

production without male assistance, as is expressly stated in the legend

of Agdistis or Cybele preserved by Pausanias[143], and perhaps hinted at

in the stories of Amazons spread throughout the whole of Asia Minor. But

it is probable that, as Sir William Ramsay himself says, this idea had

become less prominent with the immigration from Europe of tribes of male

warriors without female companions,[144] while Semitic influence was

always against it. Hence the Ophites found themselves compelled to make

their female deity inferior or posterior to their male. “Below these,

again (_i.e._ below the First and Second Man or Father-and-Son),” says

Irenaeus in reporting their doctrines, “is the Holy Spirit ... whom they

call the First Woman[145].” Neither he nor Hippolytus gives us any

direct evidence of the source whence this feminine Power was thought by

them to have issued. But Hippolytus says without circumlocution that

“this Man,” _i.e._ Adamas or the Father-and-Son, “is both male and

female[146],” and he quotes the words of an Ophite hymn[147] addressed

to him that: “_From_ thee is Father and _through_ thee is Mother, two

names immortal, parents of Aeons, O thou citizen of heaven, Man of

mighty name[148]!” Later, he puts in the mouth of the Naassene or Ophite

writer from whom he repeatedly quotes, the phrase:

“The Spirit is where the Father and the Son are named, from whom and

from the Father it is there born; and this (that is, the Spirit) is

the many-named, myriad-eyed Incomprehensible One for whom every

nature in different ways yearns,”

or in other words the soul or animating principle of Nature[149]. It

therefore seems that the first Ophites made their Supreme God a triad

like the Eleusinian, the Alexandrian, and the Anatolian, consisting of

three persons two of whom were males and the third a female, or a

Father, Mother, and Son, of whom the Son was but another and renewed

form of the Father, while the union of all three was necessary to

express every aspect of the Deity, who was nevertheless one in

essence[150]. This threefold division of things, said the Ophites, ran

through all nature “there being three worlds or universes: the angelic

(that sent directly from God), the psychic, and the earthly or material;

and three Churches: the Chosen, the Called, and the Captive[151].” The

meaning of these names we shall see later when we consider the Ophite

idea of the Apocatastasis[152] or return of the worlds to the Deity.

First, however, another Power had to be produced which should serve as

an intermediary or ambassador from the Supreme Triad to the worlds below

it. This necessity may have arisen from Plato’s view, adopted by Philo

of Alexandria, that God was too high and pure to be contaminated by any

contact with matter[153]. But it may also owe something to the idea

common to all Orientals that a king or great man can only communicate

with his inferiors through a _wakil_ or agent; and that this idea was

then current in Phrygia seems plain from the story in the Acts of the

Apostles that in the Lycaonian province Barnabas, who was of majestic

presence, was adored and nearly sacrificed to as Zeus, while Paul, who

was the principal speaker, was only revered as Hermes[154]. The later

Ophite account of the production of this intermediary power or messenger

which we find in Irenaeus is that the Father-and-Son “delighting in the

beauty of the Spirit”—that is of the First Woman—“shed their light upon

her” and thus brought into existence “an incorruptible light, the third

man, whom they call Christos[155].” With this last addition the Divine

Family was considered complete, and the same author tells us that

Christos and his mother were “immediately drawn up into the

incorruptible aeon which they call the veritable Church[156].” This

seems to be the first appearance in Gnosticism of the use of the word

Church as signifying what was later called the Pleroma or Fulness of the

Godhead; but it may be compared to the “Great Council” apparently used

in the same sense by some unidentified prophet quoted by Origen, of

which Great Council Christ was said by the prophet to be the “Angel” or

messenger[157].

From this perfect Godhead, the Ophites had to show the evolution of a

less perfect universe, a problem which they approached in a way

differing but slightly from that of Simon Magus. This last, as we have

seen, interposed between God and our own world three pairs of “Roots” or

Powers together with an intermediate world of aeons whose angels and

authorities had brought our universe into existence. These angels

purposely fashioned it from existing matter, the substance most removed

from and hostile to God, in order that they might rule over it and thus

possess a dominion of their own. But the Ophites went behind this

conception, and made the first confusion of the Divine light with matter

the result of an accident. The light, in Irenaeus’ account of their

doctrines, shed by the Father-and-Son upon the Holy Spirit was so

abundant that she could not contain it all within herself, and some of

it therefore, as it were, boiled over and fell down[158], when it was

received by that matter which they, like Simon, looked upon as existing

independently[159]. They described this last as separated into four

elements, water, darkness, the abyss, and chaos, which we may suppose to

be different strata of the same substance, the uppermost layer being

apparently the waste of waters mentioned in Genesis. Falling upon these

waters, the superfluity of light of the Holy Spirit stirred them,

although before immovable, to their lowest depths, and took from them a

body formed apparently from the envelope of waters surrounding it. Then,

rising again by a supreme effort from this contact, it made out of this

envelope the visible heaven which has ever since been stretched over the

earth like a canopy[160]. This superfluity of light which thus mingled

with matter, the earlier Ophites called, like the authors of the

Wisdom-literature, Sophia, and also Prunicos (meaning apparently the

“substitute”) and described as bisexual[161]. Another and perhaps a

later modification of their doctrine fabled that it sprang from the left

side of the First Woman while Christos emerged from her right. They

therefore called it Sinistra and declared it to be feminine only[162].

Both traditions agreed that this Sophia or Prunicos put forth a son

without male assistance, that this son in like manner gave birth to

another power and so on, until at last seven powers at seven removes

sprang from Sophia. Each of them fashioned from matter a habitation, and

these are represented as heavens or hemispheres stretched out one under

the other, every one becoming less perfect as it gets further from the

Primordial Light[163]. Irenaeus and Hippolytus are agreed that the first

or immediate son of Sophia was called Ialdabaoth, a name which Origen

says, in speaking of the Ophites, is taken from the art of magic, and

which surely enough appears in nearly all the earlier Magic Papyri[164].

Hippolytus says that this Ialdabaoth was the Demiurge and father of the

visible universe or phenomenal world[165]. Irenaeus also gives the names

of the later “heavens, virtues, powers, angels, and builders” as being

respectively Iao, Sabaoth, Adonai, Eloaeus, Oreus, and Astaphaeus or

Astanpheus, which agrees with the Ophite document or Diagram to be

presently mentioned[166]. The first four of these names are too

evidently the names given in the Old Testament to Yahweh for us to doubt

the assertion of the Fathers that by Ialdabaoth the Ophites meant the

God of the Jews[167]. The last two names, Oreus and Astaphaeus, Origen

also asserts to be taken from the art of magic, and may be supposed to

have some connection with fire and water respectively[168]. It is

probable that the later Ophites identified all these seven heavens with

the seven astrological “planets,” _i.e._ Saturn, Jupiter, Mars, the Sun,

Venus, Mercury and the Moon in probably that order[169].

How now did the earth on which we live come into being? The primitive

Babylonians, whose ideas and culture were at a very early date spread

over the whole of Asia Minor, conceived the earth not as a globe but as

a circular boat like the ancient coracle, over which the heavens

stretched like a canopy or hemisphere[170]. Hence we must regard these

heavens of the planetary powers, Ialdabaoth and his progeny, as a series

of covers fitting one within the other like, in the words of the

Fathers, “juggling cups,” or to take another simile, the successive

skins of an onion. The earth stretched below these, but was at the stage

of creation at which we have arrived really without form and void, being

the formless waste of waters which covered the denser darkness and

chaos. The ordered shape which it afterwards assumed and which we now

see, was, in the Ophite story, the result of the fall of no deity,

angel, or heavenly power, but of Man. Irenaeus’ account of this Second

Fall is that the six powers descended from Ialdabaoth began to quarrel

with their progenitor for supremacy—an idea which perhaps is to be

referred either to the Jewish tradition of the revolt of the angels or

with more likelihood to the astrological ideas about the benefic and

malefic planets[171]. This so enraged him that he glared in his wrath

upon the underlying dregs of matter, and his thought (ἔννοια) implanted

there took birth and shape[172]. This fresh son of his was possessed of

a quality of the possession of which he himself had never given any

evidence, and was called Nous or Intelligence like the male of Simon’s

first syzygy or pair of roots. But he was said to be of serpent form

(ὀφιόμορφος) because, as says the Naassene or Ophite author quoted by

Hippolytus, “the serpent is the personification of the watery element,”

and therefore, perhaps, the symbol of that external ocean which the

ancients thought surrounded the inhabited world[173]. It seems more

probable, however, that the Ophites were compelled to introduce this

form because the serpent was worshipped everywhere in Asia Minor as the

type of the paternal aspect of the earth-goddess’ consort[174]. This is

best shown, perhaps, in the Eleusinian legend of Zeus and Persephone;

but Alexander himself was said to have been begotten by Zeus in the form

of a serpent, and no Phrygian goddess seems ever to have been portrayed

without one[175]. So much was this the case that in the Apocryphal _Acta

Philippi_ it is said that sacred serpents were kept in all the heathen

temples in Asia. Hierapolis is, in the same document, called Ophioryma

or the serpent’s stronghold, whence idolatry seems to be spoken of as

the Echidna or Viper[176]. The connection of the serpent with the

Sabazian rites has already been mentioned.

This Ophiomorphus, or god in serpent form, was in the later Ophite

teaching the cause not only of man’s soul but of his passions. The Latin

text of Irenaeus says that from him came “the spirit and the soul and

all earthly things, whence all forgetfulness, and malice, and jealousy,

and envy, and death came into being[177].” This was evidently written

under the influence of the Christian idea that the serpent of Genesis

was Satan or the Devil. But Hippolytus tells us, no doubt truly, that

the Ophiomorphus of the earlier Ophites was in the opinion of his

votaries a benevolent and beneficent power. After saying that they

worship

“nothing else than Naas, whence they are called Naassenes, and that

they say that to this Naas (or serpent) alone is dedicated every

temple, and that he is to be found in every mystery and initiatory

rite,” he continues, “They say that nothing of the things that are,

whether deathless or mortal, with or without soul, could exist apart

from him. And all things are set under him, and he is good and

contains all things within himself, as in the horn of the unicorn,

whence beauty and bloom are freely given to all things that exist

according to their nature and relationship[178].”

It can hardly be doubted that the writer from whom Hippolytus here

quotes is referring to the soul or animating principle of the world,

whom he here and elsewhere identifies with the great God of the Greek

mysteries[179]. Hence it was the casting-down to this earth of

Ophiomorphus which gave it life and shape, and thus stamped upon it the

impress of the First Man[180]. As Ophiomorphus was also the child of

Ialdabaoth son of Sophia, the Soul of the World might therefore properly

be said to be drawn from all the three visible worlds[181].

We come to the creation of man which the Ophites attributed to the act

of Ialdabaoth and the other planetary powers, and represented as

taking place not on the earth, but in some one or other of the heavens

under their sway[182]. According to Irenaeus—here our only

authority—Ialdabaoth boasted that he was God and Father, and that

there was none above him[183]. His mother Sophia or Prunicos,

disgusted at this, cried out that he lied, inasmuch as there was above

him “the Father of all, the First Man and the Son of Man[184]”; and

that Ialdabaoth was thereby led on the counsel of the serpent or

Ophiomorphus to say, “Let us make man in our own image[185]!” Here the

Greek or older text of Irenaeus ends, and our only remaining guide is

the later Latin one, which bears many signs of having been added to

from time to time by some person more zealous for orthodoxy than

accuracy. Such as it is, however, it narrates at a length which

compares very unfavourably with the brevity and concision of the

statements of the Greek text, that Ialdabaoth’s six planetary powers

on his command and at the instigation of Sophia formed an immense man

who could only writhe along the ground until they carried him to

Ialdabaoth who breathed into him the breath of life, thereby parting

with some of the light that was in himself; that man “having thereby

become possessed of intelligence (Nous) and desire (Enthymesis)

abandoned his makers and gave thanks to the First Man”; that

Ialdabaoth on this in order to deprive man of the light he had given

him created Eve out of his own desire; that the other planetary powers

fell in love with her beauty and begot from her sons who are called

angels; and finally, that the serpent induced Adam and Eve to

transgress Ialdabaoth’s command not to eat of the fruit of the Tree of

Knowledge[186]. On their doing so, he cast them out of Paradise, and

threw them down to this world together with the serpent or

Ophiomorphus. All this was done by the secret contrivance of Sophia,

whose object throughout was to win back the light and return it to the

highest world whence it had originally come. Her manner of doing so

seems to have been somewhat roundabout, for it involved the further

mingling of light with matter, and even included the taking away by

her of light from Adam and Eve when turned out of Paradise and the

restoring it to them when they appeared on this earth—a proceeding

which gave them to understand that they had become clothed with

material bodies in which their stay would be only temporary[187].

Cain’s murder of Abel was brought about by the same agency, as was the

begettal of Seth, ancestor of the existing human race. We further

learn that the serpent who was cast down got under him the angels

begotten upon Eve by the planetary powers, and brought into existence

six sons who, with himself, form “the seven earthly demons.” These are

the adversaries of mankind, because it was on account of man that

their father was cast down; and “this serpent is called Michael and

Sammael[188].” Later Ialdabaoth sent the Flood, sought out Abraham,

and gave the Law to the Jews. In this, as in everything, he was

opposed by his mother Sophia, who saved Noah, made the Prophets

prophesy of Christ, and even arranged that John the Baptist and Jesus

should be born, the one from Elizabeth and the other from the Virgin

Mary[189]. In all this, it is difficult not to see a later

interpolation introduced for the purpose of incorporating with the

teaching of the earlier Ophites the Biblical narrative, of which they

were perhaps only fully informed through Apostolic teaching[190]. It

is quite possible that this interpolation may be taken from the

doctrine of the Sethians, which Irenaeus expressly couples in this

chapter with that of the Ophites, and which, as given by Hippolytus,

contains many Jewish but no Christian features[191]. Many of the

stories in this interpolation seem to have found their way into the

Talmud and the later Cabala, as well as into some of the Manichaean

books.

So far, then, the Ophites succeeded in accounting to their satisfaction

for the origin of all things, the nature of the Deity, the origin of the

universe, and for that of man’s body. But they still had to account in

detail for the existence of the soul or incorporeal part of man.

Irenaeus, as we have seen, attributes it to Ophiomorphus, but although

this may have been the belief of the Ophites of his time, the Naassenes

assigned it a more complicated origin. They divided it, as Hippolytus

tells us, into three parts which were nevertheless one, no doubt

corresponding to the threefold division that we have before seen running

through all nature into angelic, psychic, and earthly[192]. The angelic

part is brought by Christos, who is, as we have seen, the angel or

messenger of the triune Deity, into “the form of clay[193],” the psychic

we may suppose to be fashioned with the body by the planetary powers,

and the earthly is possibly thought to be the work of the earthly demons

hostile to man[194]. Of these last two parts, however, we hear nothing

directly, and their existence can only be gathered from the difference

here strongly insisted upon between things “celestial earthly and

infernal.” But the conveyance of the angelic soul to the body

Hippolytus’ Ophite writer illustrates by a bold figure from what Homer

in the _Odyssey_ says concerning Hermes in his character of psychopomp

or leader of souls[195]. As to the soul or animating principle of the

world, Hippolytus tells us that the Ophites did not seek information

concerning it and its nature from the Scriptures, where indeed they

would have some difficulty in finding any, but from the mystic rites

alike of the Greeks and the Barbarians[196]; and he takes us in turns

through the mysteries of the Syrian worshippers of Adonis, of the

Phrygians, the Egyptian (or rather Alexandrian) worshippers of Osiris,

of the Cabiri of Samothrace, and finally those celebrated at Eleusis,

pointing out many things which he considers as indicating the Ophites’

own peculiar doctrine on this point[197]. That he considers the god

worshipped in all these different mysteries to be one and the same

divinity seems plain from a hymn which he quotes as a song of “the great

Mysteries,” and which the late Prof. Conington turned into English

verse[198]. So far as any sense can be read into an explanation made

doubly hard for us by our ignorance of what really took place in the

rites the Ophite writer describes, or of any clear account of his own

tenets, he seems to say that the many apparently obscene and sensual

scenes that he alludes to, cover the doctrine that man’s soul is part of

the universal soul diffused through Nature and eventually to be freed

from all material contact and united to the Deity; whence it is only

those who abstain from the practice of carnal generation who can hope to

be admitted to the highest heaven[199]. All this is illustrated by many

quotations not only from the heathen poets and philosophers, but also

from the Pentateuch, the Psalms, the Jewish Prophets, and from the

Canonical Gospels and St Paul’s Epistles.

The connection of such a system with orthodox Christianity seems at

first sight remote enough, but it must be remembered that Hippolytus was

not endeavouring to explain or record the Ophite beliefs as a historian

would have done, but to hold them up to ridicule and, as he describes

it, to “refute” them. Yet there can be no doubt that the Ophites were

Christians or followers of Christ who accepted without question the

Divine Mission of Jesus, and held that only through Him could they

attain salvation. The difference between them and the orthodox in

respect to this was that salvation was not, according to them, offered

freely to all, but was on the contrary a magical result following

automatically upon complete initiation and participation in the

Mysteries[200]. Texts like “Strait is the way and narrow is the gate

that leadeth into eternal life” and “Not every one that saith unto me

Lord, Lord, shall enter into the kingdom of heaven” were laid hold of by

them as showing that complete salvation was confined to a few highly

instructed persons, who had had the sense to acquire the knowledge of

the nature of the Deity and of the topography of the heavenly places

which underlay the ceremonies of the Mysteries. Such an one, they said

after his death would be born again not with a fleshly but with a

spiritual body and passing through the gate of heaven would become a

god[201]. It does not follow, however, that those who did not obtain

this perfect _gnosis_ would be left, as in some later creeds, to

reprobation. The cry of “all things in heaven, on earth, and below the

earth[202]” that the discord of this world[203] might be made to cease,

which the Naassene author quoted by Hippolytus daringly connects with

the name of Pappas given by the Phrygians to Sabazius or Dionysos, would

one day be heard, and the Apocatastasis or return of the world to the

Deity would then take place[204]. If we may judge from the later

developments of the Ophite teaching this was to be when the last

spiritual man (πνευματικός) or perfect Gnostic had been withdrawn from

it. In the meantime those less gifted would after death pass through the

planetary worlds of Ialdabaoth until they arrived at his heaven or

sphere, and would then be sent down to the earth to be reincarnated in

other bodies. Whether those who had attained some knowledge of the

Divine nature without arriving at perfect Gnosis would or would not be

rewarded with some sort of modified beatitude or opportunity of better

instruction is not distinctly stated, but it is probable that the

Ophites thought that they would[205]. For just as those who have been

admitted into the Lesser Mysteries at Eleusis ought to pause and then be

admitted into the “great and heavenly ones,” the progress of the Ophite

towards the Deity must be progressive. They who participate in these

heavenly mysteries, says the Naassene author, receive greater destinies

than the others[206].

It might seem, therefore, that the Mysteries or secret rites of the

heathens contained in themselves all that was necessary for redemption,

and this was probably the Ophite view so far as the return of the

universe to the bosom of the Deity and the consequent wiping out of the

consequences of the unfortunate fall of Sophia or Prunicos were

concerned. A tradition. preserved by Irenaeus says that Sophia herself

“when she had received a desire for the light above her, laid down the

body she had received from matter—which was, as we have seen, the

visible heaven—-and was freed from it[207].” But this seems to be an

addition which is not found in the Greek version, and is probably taken

from some later developments of the Ophite creed. It is plain, however,

that the whole scheme of nature as set forth in the opinions summarized

above is represented as contrived for the winning-back of the light—for

which we may, if we like, read life—from matter, and this is represented

as the work of Sophia herself. The futile attempt of the arrogant and

jealous Ialdabaoth to prolong his rule by the successive creation of

world after world, of the archetypal or rather protoplasmic Adam, and

finally of Eve, whereby the light is dispersed through matter more

thoroughly but in ever-diminishing portions[208], is turned against him

by his mother Sophia, the beneficent ruler of the planetary worlds, who

even converts acquaintance with the “carnal generation” which he has

invented into a necessary preparation for the higher mysteries[209].

Thus Hippolytus tells us that the Naassenes

“frequent the so-called mysteries of the Great Mother, thinking that

through what is performed there, they see clearly the whole mystery.

For they have no complete advantage from the things there performed

except that they are not castrated. [Yet] they fully accomplish the

work of the castrated [_i.e._ the Galli]. For they most strictly and

carefully preach that one should abstain from all companying with

woman, as do the castrated. And the rest of the work, as we have

said at length, they perform like the castrated[210].”

So far, then, as the general scheme of the redemption of light from

matter is concerned, there seems to have been no fundamental necessity

in the Ophite view for the Mission of Jesus. But they assigned to Him a

great and predominant part in hastening the execution of the scheme, and

thus bringing about the near approach of the kingdom of heaven. We have

seen that Sophia provided in spite of Ialdabaoth for the birth of the

man Jesus from the Virgin Mary, and the Naassene author said that

“into this body of Jesus there withdrew and descended things

intellectual, and psychic, and earthly: and these three Men (_i.e._

the First Man, the Son of Man, and Christos) speak together through

Him each from his proper substance unto those who belong to

each[211].”

The Latin text of Irenaeus amplifies the statement considerably and says

that Prunicus, as it calls Sophia, finding no rest in heaven or earth,

invoked the aid of her mother the First Woman. This power, having pity

on her repentance, implored the First Man to send Christos to her

assistance. This prayer was granted, and Christos descended from the

Pleroma to his sister Sophia, announced his coming through John the

Baptist, prepared the baptism of repentance, and beforehand fashioned

Jesus, so that when Christos came down he might find a pure vessel, and

that by Ialdabaoth her own son, the “woman” might be announced by

Christ. The author quoted by Irenaeus goes on to say that Christ

descended through each of the seven heavens or planetary worlds in the

likeness of its inhabitants, and thus took away much of their power. For

the sprinkling of light scattered among them rushed to him, and when he

came down into this world he clothed his sister Sophia with it, and they

exulted over each other, which they (the Ophites) “describe as the

[meeting of] the bridegroom and the bride.” But “Jesus being begotten

from the Virgin by the operation of God was wiser, purer, and juster

than all men. Christos united to Sophia descended into Him [in His

baptism] and so Jesus Christ was made[212].”

Jesus then began to heal the sick, to announce the unknown Father, and

to reveal Himself as the Son of the first man. This angered the princes

of the planetary worlds and their progenitor, Ialdabaoth, who contrived

that He should be killed. As He was being led away for this purpose,

Christos with Sophia left Him for the incorruptible aeon[213] or highest

heaven. Jesus was crucified; but Christos did not forget Him and sent a

certain power to Him, who raised Him in both a spiritual and psychic

body, sending the worldly parts back into the world. After His

Resurrection, Jesus remained upon earth eighteen months, and perception

descending into Him taught what was clear. These things He imparted to a

few of his disciples whom He knew to be capable of receiving such great

mysteries, and He was then received into heaven. Christos sate down at

the night hand of Ialdabaoth that he might, unknown to this last, take

to himself the souls of those who have known these mysteries, after they

have put off their worldly flesh. Thus Ialdabaoth cannot in future hold

holy souls that he may send them down again into the age [_i.e._ this

aeon]; but only those which are from his own substance, that is, which

he has himself breathed into bodies. When all the sprinkling of light is

thus collected, it will be taken up into the incorruptible aeon. The

return to Deity will then be complete, and matter will probably be

destroyed. In any case, it will have lost the light which alone gives it

life[214].

What rites or form of worship were practised by these Ophites we do not

know, although Epiphanius preserves a story that they were in the habit

of keeping a tame serpent in a chest which at the moment of the

consecration of their Eucharist was released and twined itself round the

consecrated bread[215]. Probably the very credulous Bishop of Constantia

was misled by some picture or amulet depicting a serpent with his tail

in its mouth surrounding an orb or globe which represents the mundane

egg of the Orphics. In this case the serpent most likely represented the

external ocean which the ancients thought surrounded the habitable world

like a girdle. But the story, though probably untrue, is some evidence

that the later Ophites used, like all post-Christian Gnostics, to

practise a ceremony resembling the Eucharist, and certainly administered

also the rite of baptism which is alluded to above in the tale of the

descent of Christos. Hippolytus also tells us that they used to sing

many hymns to the First Man; and he gives us a “psalm” composed by them

which, as he thinks, “comprehends all the mysteries of their

error[216].” Unfortunately in the one text of the _Philosophumena_ which

we have, it is given in so corrupt a form that the first German editor

declared it to be incapable of restoration. It may perhaps be translated

thus:

The generic law of the Whole was the first Intelligence of all

The second [creation?] was the poured-forth Chaos of the First-born

And the third and labouring soul obtains the law as her portion

Wherefore clothed in watery form [Behold]

The loved one subject to toil [and] death

Now, having lordship, she beholds the Light

Then cast forth to piteous state, she weeps.

Now she weeps and now rejoices

Now she weeps and now is judged

Now she is judged and now is dying

Now no outlet is found, the unhappy one

Into the labyrinth of woes has wandered.

But Jesus said: Father, behold!

A strife of woes upon earth

From thy spirit has fallen

But he [_i.e._ man?] seeks to fly the malignant chaos

And knows not how to break it up.

For his sake, send me, O Father;

Having the seals, I will go down

Through entire aeons I will pass,

All mysteries I will open

And the forms of the gods I will display,

The secrets of the holy Way

Called knowledge [Gnosis], I will hand down.

It is probable that this psalm really did once contain a summary of the

essential parts of the Ophite teaching. In whatever way we may construe

the first three lines, which were probably misunderstood by the scribe

of the text before us, there can hardly be a doubt that they disclose a

triad of three powers engaged in the work of salvation[217]. The fall of

Sophia seems also to be alluded to in unmistakable terms, while the

Mission of Jesus concludes the poem. Jesus, not here distinguished from

the Christos or Heavenly Messenger of the Trinity, is described as sent

to the earth for the purpose of bringing hither certain “mysteries”

which will put man on the sacred path of Gnosis and thus bring about the

redemption of his heavenly part from the bonds of matter. These

“mysteries” were, as appears in Hippolytus and elsewhere, sacraments

comprising baptism, unction, and a ceremony at least outwardly

resembling the Christian Eucharist or Lord’s Supper[218]. These had the

magical effect, already attributed by the Orphics to their own

homophagous feast, of changing the recipient’s place in the scale of

being and transforming him _ipso facto_ into something higher than man.

That the celebration of these mysteries was attended with the deepest

secrecy accounts at once for their being nowhere described in detail by

Hippolytus’ Ophite author, and also for the stories which were current

among all the heresiological writers of filthy and obscene rites[219].

Fortified by these mysteries, and by the abstinences and the continence

which they entailed—at all events theoretically, and as a counsel of

perfection—the Ophite could attend, as we have seen, all the ceremonies

of the still pagan Anatolians or of the Christian Church indifferently,

conscious that he alone understood the inner meaning of either.

Another practice of the Ophites has accidentally come down to us which

deserves some mention. The division of the universe into three parts,

_i.e._ angelic, psychic, and earthly, which we have already seen in germ

in the system of Simon Magus, was by the Ophites carried so much further

than by him that it extended through the whole of nature, and seriously

affected their scheme of redemption. Father Giraud, as we have seen,

goes so far as to say that in the opinion of Naassenes, matter hardly

existed, and that they thought that not only did Adamas, or the first

man, enter into all things, but that in their opinion all things were

contained within him[220]. This pantheistic doctrine may have been

current in Phrygia and traces of it may perhaps be found in the

Anatolian worship of nature; but the words of the Naassene psalm quoted

above show that the Naassenes, like all the post-Christian Gnostics of

whom we know anything, thought that matter not only had an independent

existence, but was essentially malignant and opposed to God. They

divided, as we have seen, the universe which came forth from Him into

three parts of which the angelic, noëtic, or pneumatic included,

apparently, nothing but the Pleroma or Fulness of the Godhead consisting

of the Trinity of Father, Son and Mother with their messenger Christos.

Then followed the second, psychic, or planetary world, containing the

heaven of Sophia with beneath it the holy hebdomad or seven worlds of

Ialdabaoth and his descendants[221]. Below this came, indeed, the choïc,

earthly, or terrestrial world, containing some sparks of the light

bestowed upon it consciously by Sophia and unconsciously by Ialdabaoth,

and inhabited by mortal men. But this world was the worst example of the

“discord” (ὰσυμφωνία), or as it was called later, the “confusion”

(κέρασμος), caused by the mingling of light with matter, and as such was

doomed to extinction and to eternal separation from the Divine.[222] In

like manner, the soul of man consisted of three parts corresponding to

the three worlds, that is to say, the pneumatic, psychic, and earthly;

and of these three, the last was doomed to extinction. Only by laying

aside his earthly part as Jesus had done and becoming entirely

pneumatic, could man attain to the light and become united with the

Godhead. But to do so, his soul must first pass from choïc to psychic

and thence to pneumatic, or, as the Naassene author quoted by Hippolytus

puts it, must be born again and must enter in at the gate of

heaven[223].

This rebirth or passage of the soul from the choïc to the psychic, and

thence to the pneumatic, was, as has been said, the work of the

mysteries, especially of those new ones which the Ophite Jesus or

Christos had brought to earth with Him from above. The process by which

these “changes of the soul” were brought about was, according to the

Naassenes, “set forth in the Gospel according to the Egyptians[224].”

The only quotation pertinent to the matter which we have from this lost

work is one preserved for us by Clement of Alexandria which refers to

the coming of a heavenly age “when the two shall be made one, and the

male with the female neither male nor female[225]”—a saying which seems

to refer to the time when all the light now scattered among the lower

worlds shall return to the androgyne Adamas from whom it once issued.

But it is probable that this gospel only described the upward passage of

the soul in figures and parables probably conveyed in texts of the

Canonical Gospel divorced from their context and their natural meaning,

as in the Naassene author quoted by Hippolytus. Such a gospel might be a

sufficient means of instruction for the living, who could puzzle out its

meaning with the help of their mystagogues or priests[226]; but it must

always have been difficult for the best-instructed to remember the great

complications of worlds, planets, and celestial powers that lay at the

root of it. How difficult then must it have been thought for the

disembodied soul to find its way through the celestial places, and to

confront the “guardians of the gate” of each with proof of his exalted

rank in the scale of being? What was wanted was some guide or clue that

the dead could take with him like the _Book of the Dead_ of the ancient

Egyptians, some memory or survival of which had evidently come down to

the Alexandrian worship[227], or like the gold plates which we have seen

fulfilling the same office among the worshippers of the Orphic

gods[228].

That the Ophites possessed such documents we have proof from the remarks

of the Epicurean Celsus, who may have flourished in the reign of Hadrian

(A.D. 117-138)[229]. In his attack on Christianity called _The True

Discourse_, he charges the Christians generally with possessing a

“diagram” in which the passage of the soul after death through the seven

heavens is portrayed. Origen, in refuting this Epicurean’s arguments

more than a century later, denies that the Church knew anything of such

a diagram, and transfers the responsibility for it to what he calls “a

very insignificant sect called Ophites[230].” He further says that he

has himself seen this diagram and he gives a detailed description of it

sufficient to enable certain modern writers to hazard a guess as to what

it must have looked like[231]. It seems to have been chiefly composed of

circles, those in the uppermost part—which Celsus says were those “above

the heavens”—being two sets of pairs. Each pair consisted of two

concentric circles, one pair being inscribed, according to Origen,

Father-and-Son, and according to Celsus, “a greater and a less” which

Origen declares means the same thing[232]. By the side of this was the

other pair, the outer circle here being coloured yellow and the inner

blue; while between the two pairs was a barrier drawn in the form of a

double-bladed axe[233].

“Above this last” Origen says “was a smaller circle inscribed

‘Love,’ and below it another touching it with the word ‘Life.’ And

on the second circle, which was intertwined with and included two

other circles, another figure like a rhomboid ‘The Forethought of

Sophia.’ And within their (?) point of common section was ‘the

Nature of Sophia.’ And above their point of common section was a

circle, on which was inscribed ‘Knowledge,’ and lower down another

on which was the inscription ‘Comprehension[234].’”

There is also reference made by Origen to “The Gates of Paradise,” and a

flaming sword depicted as the diameter of a flaming circle and guarding

the tree of knowledge and of life; but nothing is said of their

respective places in the diagram.

Jacques Matter, whose _Histoire Critique du Gnosticisme_ appeared in

1843, without its author having the benefit of becoming acquainted with

Hippolytus’ _Philosophumena_, which tells us so much as to the doctrines

of the Naassenes or early Ophites, and Father Giraud, who has on the

contrary drawn largely from it, and whose dissertation on the Ophites

was published in 1884, have both given pictorial representations of the

Ophite diagram. Although they differ somewhat in the arrangement of the

circles, both are agreed that the blue and yellow circles signify the

Holy Spirit and Christos. The Pleroma or Fulness of the Godhead

consisting of Father, Son and Holy Spirit, with the Christos their

messenger, therefore seems figured in these two pairs of circles. Both

Matter and Father Giraud also arrange four other circles labelled

respectively Knowledge, Nature, Wisdom, and Comprehension (Γνῶσις,

Φύσις, Σοφία, and Σύνεσις) within one large one with a border of

intertwined lines which they call the Forethought of Sophia (Πρόνοια

Σοφίας). This may be the correct rendering, but it is hardly warranted

by Origen’s words given above, nor do we know of any powers, aeons, or

other entities in the Ophite system called Gnosis or Physis[235]. In any

event, however, it is fairly clear that this part of the diagram

represents the Sophia who fell from the Holy Spirit into matter, and

that her natural or first place should be the heaven stretched out above

the seven planetary worlds. Yet Irenaeus tells us that the Ophites he

describes thought that Sophia succeeded finally in struggling free from

the body of matter and that the super-planetary firmament represented

merely the lifeless shell she had abandoned[236]. This is, perhaps, the

view taken by the framers of the diagram.

However that may be, Origen’s discourse agrees with Celsus in describing

a “thick black line marked Gehenna or Tartarus” which cuts, as he says,

the diagram in two. This is specially described by Celsus; and if it

surprises anyone to find it thus placed above the planetary heavens, it

can only be said that later Gnostics, including those who are

responsible for the principal documents of the _Pistis Sophia_ to be

presently mentioned, put one of the places where souls were tortured in

“the Middle Way” which seems _above_, and not, like the classical

Tartarus, _below_ the earth[237]. Below this again, come the seven

spheres of the planets dignified by the names of Horaios, Ailoaios,

Astaphaios, Sabaoth, Iao, Ialdabaoth and Adonai respectively. These

names are, indeed, those given in Irenaeus as the names of the

descendants of Sophia, although the order there given is different. As

to the meaning of them, Origen declares that Ialdabaoth, Horaios, and

Astaphaios are taken from magic and that the others are (the Hebrew)

names of God[238]. But it should be noticed that Origen is in this place

silent as to their situation in the diagram, and that those assigned to

them in Matter’s and Father Giraud’s reconstructions are taken from the

prayers or “defences” which will be given independently of it.

The division which Matter calls “Atmosphère terrestre” and Father Giraud

“The Fence of Wickedness” (Φραγμὸς Κακίας) is also not to be found in

Origen’s description of the diagram, but is taken from another passage

where he defines it as the gates leading to the aeon of the

archons[239]. The remaining sphere, containing within itself ten circles

in Matter’s reconstruction and seven in Father Giraud’s, is however

fully described. The number ten is, as Matter himself admitted to be

probable, a mistake of the copyist for seven[240], and there can be no

doubt that the larger sphere is supposed to represent our world. The

word “Leviathan” which in accordance with Origen’s description is

written both at the circumference and at the centre of the circle[241]

is evidently Ophiomorphus or the serpent-formed son of Ialdabaoth whom

we have seen cast down to earth by his father together with the

protoplasts Adam and Eve[242]. He should according to the later Gnostics

be represented in the shape of a “dragon” or serpent coiled round the

world and having his tail in his mouth, while the seven circles within

the ring thus formed are the seven Archons or ruling spirits created by

him in imitation of Ialdabaoth. These are represented in beast-like form

and are, as we have seen, hostile to man. The first four have the Hebrew

angelic names of Michael, Suriel, Raphael, and Gabriel, perhaps because

the four planetary worlds to which they correspond bear also Hebrew

names of God[243]. The remaining three Thauthabaoth, Erataoth, and

Thartharaoth are probably taken from the peculiar corruption of Hebrew

and Egyptian words to be found in the Magic Papyri. Some of them, at any

rate, we meet again later. The word Behemoth which appears at the foot

of the diagram may be translated “animals[244].” It may either be a

further description of the seven Archons—as seems most likely—or be

taken in its etymological sense as the animal kingdom which in the scale

of being succeeds terrestrial man.

To this diagram, Origen adds the prayers or defences above alluded to,

which he draws from some source not mentioned. He calls them the

“instruction” which they (_i.e._ the Ophites) receive after passing

through the “fence of wickedness,—gates which are subjected to the world

of the Archons[245]”; but we know from other sources that they are the

speeches, “defences” or passwords required to be uttered by the soul of

the initiated when, released from this world by death, she flies upwards

through the planetary spheres[246]. As they contain many instructive

allusions, they can best be given in Origen’s own words, at the same

time remarking that the reading is not in all cases very well settled.

The first power through whose realm the soul had to pass is not here

mentioned by name, but by the process of exhaustion is plainly the one

whom Irenaeus calls Adonaeus or Adonai.

To him the soul of the dead is to say:

“I salute the one-formed king, the bond of blindness, thoughtless

oblivion, the first power preserved by the spirit of Pronoia and by

Sophia; whence I am sent forth pure, being already part of the light

of the Son and of the Father. Let grace be with me, O Father, yea

let it be with me[247]!”

In passing through the next mentioned, which is the realm of Ialdabaoth:

“Thou O First and Seventh, born to command with boldness, Ialdabaoth

the Ruler (Archon) who hast the word of pure Mind (νοῦς), a perfect

work to the Son and the Father, I bring the symbol of life in the

impress of a type, and open the door to the world which in thy aeon

thou didst close, and pass again free through thy realm. Let grace

be with me, O Father, yea let it be with me[248]!”

Arrived at Iao, he ought to say:

“Thou, O Second Iao and first lord of death, who dost rule over the

hidden mysteries of the Son and the Father, who dost shine by night,

part of the guiltless one. I bear my own beard as a symbol and am

ready to pass through thy rule, having been strengthened by that

which was born from thee by the living word. Let grace be with me, O

Father, yea let it be with me[249]!”

To Sabaoth:

“Ruler of the Fifth realm, King Sabaoth, advocate of the law of thy

creation. I am freed by grace of a mightier Pentad. Admit me, when

thou beholdest the blameless symbol of thy art preserved by the

likeness of a type, a body set free by a pentad. Let grace be with

me, O Father, yea let it be with me[250]!”

To Astaphaios:

“Ὁ Astaphaios, Ruler of the third gate, overseer of the first

principle of water, behold me an initiate, admit me who have been

purified by the spirit of a virgin, thou who seest the substance of

the Cosmos. Let grace be with me, O Father, yea let it be with

me[251]!”

To Ailoaios:

“O Ailoaios, ruler of the second gate, admit me who brings to thee

the symbol of thy mother, a grace hidden from the powers of the

authorities. Let grace be with me, O Father, yea let it be with

me[252]!”

and to Horaios:

“O Horaios, who didst fearlessly overleap the fence of fire

receiving the rulership of the first gate, admit me when thou

beholdest the symbol of thy power, engraved on the type of the Tree

of Life, and formed by resemblance in the likeness of the Guiltless

One. Let grace be with me, O Father, yea let it be with me[253]!”

These defences have evidently got out of their proper order, and have

probably been a good deal corrupted as well[254]. But their form and

general purport are mostly intelligible and show undoubted signs of

Egyptian origin. They were therefore probably not the work of the

earlier Ophites or Naassenes, but were most likely introduced when the

Ophite doctrines began to leave their primitive seat in Phrygia and to

spread westward into North Africa and the south-east of Europe. The

diagram itself seems to be fairly expressive of the more ancient

teaching and in particular the division of all things below the Godhead

into three parts. Thus we find in it the “middle space” or heaven of

Sophia, itself perhaps the Paradise whence the protoplasts and

Ophiomorphus were hurled, then the world of seven planets, and finally

this earth under the government of Ophiomorphus’ seven angels. To judge

from Origen’s remark that “they say there is a sympathy (συμπάθεια)

between the Star Phaenon (_i.e._ Saturn) and the lion-like power

(Michael)[255],” it is probable that the Ophites, like the Babylonian

astrologers, looked upon the system of “correspondences,” as it was

afterwards called, as running through all nature in such a way that

every world and every power inhabiting it was a reflection of the one

above it[256]. That each world according to the Naassenes contained a

“Church” or assembly of souls[257] is stated in the text quoted above,

the “Captive” Church there mentioned being evidently composed of the

souls still held in the grip of matter, the “Called” of those who had

passed into the planetary worlds, and the “Chosen” of those who were

purified enough to be admitted into the middle space or Paradise of

Sophia[258]. That these last were thought to be eventually united with

the Deity appears in some later developments of the Ophite faith, but

the doctrine seems also to have been known to the Naassenes, since the

author quoted by Hippolytus speaks of “the perfect gnostics” becoming

“kingless” (that is, subject to no other being) and as appointed to

“share in the Pleroma[259].”

Of the amount of success which the speculations of the Ophites enjoyed

we know very little. Origen, as we have seen, speaks of them as being in

his day “an insignificant sect”; and we have no proof that their numbers

were ever very large[260]. Father Giraud asserts on the faith of some of

the smaller heresiologists and Conciliar Acts that they spread over the

whole of Asia Minor, through Syria and Palestine into Egypt on the one

hand, and, on the other, to Mesopotamia, Armenia, and even to India, and

this is probably more or less correct[261]. But those who had actually

read their writings, as Irenaeus and Hippolytus evidently had done, seem

to have looked upon them more as the source of many later heresies than

as formidable by their own numbers. Whether the Sethians with whom

Irenaeus would identify them were really a subdivision of the Ophite

sect may be doubted, because in Hippolytus’ account of the Sethian

doctrines, the existence of Jesus is never mentioned or referred to, and

there is some reason for thinking them a non-Christian sect[262]. But

the heresies of the Peratae and of Justinus, which Hippolytus describes

as not differing much from the Ophites, certainly resemble that which

has been summarized above too closely for the resemblance to be

accidental; while the same remark applies to those of the Barbeliotae

and Cainites described by Irenaeus, and to the Gnostics, Archontics, and

others of whom we read in Epiphanius’ _Panarion_. Most of these sects

seem to have flourished on the Eastern or Asiatic outskirts of the Roman

Empire, although some of them probably had settlements also in Egypt,

Greece, Crete, and Cyrene. As the first Ophites had contrived to make an

amalgam of the fervent and hysterical worship of nature in Anatolia with

the Jewish and Christian tenets, so no doubt these daughter sects

contrived to fit in with them the legends of the local cults among which

they found themselves. But such compromises were not likely to last long

when the Catholic Church began to define and enforce the orthodox faith,

and the Ophites seem to have been one of the first to succumb. In the

Vth century A.D., there were still Ophite “colleges” to be found in the

province of Bithynia; for Theocritus and Evander, the bishops of

Chalcedon and Nicomedia, “refuted” their leaders publicly with such

effect, says Praedestinatus, that they afterwards broke into their

“secret places” at the head of a furious mob, drove away their priests,

killed the sacred serpents, and “delivered the people from that

danger[263].” This is the last that we hear of them as an organized

sect, and although Justinian in A.D. 530 thought right to include them

by name in his law against heretics, it is probable that by then their

opinions had long since passed into other forms[264].

Probably one of the first changes to take place in the Ophite faith was

the withdrawal into the background of the serpent worship which respect

for the ancient cults of Asia Minor had imposed upon the earlier members

of the sect. In the diagram, Ophiomorphus does not seem to have been

depicted in his proper shape, although he may perhaps be identified with

the Leviathan there shown as surrounding the terrestrial world. Those

Ophites who wished to obtain proselytes among Christian catechumens no

doubt felt the advisability of not insisting upon this conception,

inasmuch as “the serpent” was the figure under which the Oriental

Christians loved to allude to the Pagan worships which still opposed

them in Asia Minor[265]. Hence there arose much confusion among the

Ophites themselves as to the character of the serpent, and while some,

according to Irenaeus, asserted that Sophia the mother of Ialdabaoth

herself became the serpent[266], Theodoret, a very late witness, thinks

that the Ophites of his time held that Ophiomorphus, although originally

the minister of Sophia, had gone over to the other side, and had become

the enemy of mankind[267]. In this we may also, perhaps, see, if we

will, the effect of Egyptian influence upon the earlier Ophite teaching;

for in Egypt, the serpent Apep was always looked upon as the enemy of

Râ, the Sun-god, who was rightly considered the great benefactor of

humanity. It is no doubt due to the same influence that in one of the

documents of the _Pistis Sophia_—one part of which, as will be seen

later, was probably written for the furtherance of a late form of the

Ophite heresy—the serpent, while keeping his place in the Cosmos as the

great ocean which surrounds the earth, is transformed into the outer

darkness of the Canonical Gospels, and described as a huge

torture-chamber for the punishment of souls[268]. The same document

shows us how the Ophites, while adopting all the ideas of their

predecessors the Orphics as to the respective states of the initiated

and uninitiated after death,—including therein their reincarnation, the

draught from the lake of memory and the like—contrived to mix with them

the current astrological ideas of the time which made all these events

happen in an order determined by the motions of the stars[269]. This

tendency, already visible in Hippolytus’ time in the Ophite sect which

he calls the Peratae[270], will, however, be better considered when we

come to deal with the documents of the _Pistis Sophia_ themselves.

There remains to be said that _the Gospel according to the Egyptians_

mentioned above is the only apocryphal document that Hippolytus directly

attributes to the earlier Ophites or Naassenes. The sects derived from

them seem to have made use of a great number of others, among which we

find a _Book of Baruch_ otherwise unknown to us, _The Paraphrase of

Seth_, the _Gospels of Nicodemus_, _Philip_, and _Thomas_, together with

a _Gospel according to the Hebrews_, which may or may not have been

identical with the one which Hippolytus calls that according to the

Egyptians[271]. Of these, the first two are entirely lost, and the

documents which we possess bearing the name of the Gospel of Nicodemus

relate the events of the Crucifixion in much the same way as the

Canonical Gospels, but add thereto the visit of Jesus to Hades. A

_Gospel of Thomas_, which is also extant, contains only the account of

miracles performed by Jesus in His infancy, and therefore goes to

controvert the Ophite theory that Christos and Sophia only descended

upon Him at His baptism, and that up to that period He was as other men.

It is probable, however, that our copies of these Apocryphal Gospels

have been severely edited so as to expunge everything which savoured of

Gnostic teaching and may really have been partly or wholly the work of

Ophites[272]. Of the _Gospel of Philip_, Epiphanius has preserved a

short passage as follows:

“The Lord has revealed to me what the soul ought to say when she

goes to heaven, and how she ought to answer each of the Powers on

high. ‘I have known myself,’ she says, ‘and I have collected myself

from everywhere, and I have not begotten children for the Archon,

but I have rooted out his roots, and I have collected the scattered

members, and I know thee what thou art. For I, she says, am from

above[273].’ And thus he [_i.e._ Philip] says, she is set free. But

if, he says, she is found to have begotten a son, she is retained

below, until she can receive again her own children, and draw them

up to herself[274].”

Similar expressions are to be found in two of the documents of the

_Pistis Sophia_, and the abstinence from sexual intercourse which they

enjoin is direct and first-hand evidence rebutting the accusation of

promiscuous immorality which Epiphanius brings against the Ophites or

their related sects. Epiphanius attributes to the same sect of

“Gnostici” the use of a _Gospel of Perfection_ which “others”—the

context shows that he means certain Ophites—“are not ashamed to call the

Gospel of Eve.” Of this he also preserves a single passage as follows:

“I stood upon a high mountain, and I saw a huge man and another who

was mutilated [or perhaps only smaller, κολοβὸν] and I heard a voice

of thunder, and I drew near to hearken and he spoke to me and said,

‘I am thou and thou art I; and where thou art, there am I, and I am

scattered through all things. And whencesoever thou dost wish,

collect me, and in collecting me, thou dost collect thyself[275].’”

Is the greater and lesser man here the Adamas or Father-and-Son of the

Ophites, in which case the latter part of the passage doubtless refers

to the scattering of the light through the world of matter and the

necessity of its collection and return to the Godhead. The “I am thou

and thou art I” phrase is repeated in the _Pistis Sophia_ by the risen

Jesus to His disciples[276], and seems to refer to the final union of

the perfected human soul with the Deity.